Irrelevant Cheetah

One of my hobbies is keeping aquariums. I’ve got two, and my plan is to put some puffer fish in the larger of the tanks. Interestingly, puffer fish have teeth that are not unlike rodent teeth. They keep growing, and unless the fish is fed something hard, the teeth must be kept trimmed.

As a result, many puffer fish owners breed snails. Puffers love snails, and the shells are perfect for keeping their teeth in good order. The guy at the fish store told me to get some snails, throw them in a bucket of water with an air stone, feed them occasionally, and I could breed them easily for my puffers.

Snails, conveniently, are hermaphrodites. They’ve got both male and female parts. If two snails “meet for coffee,” they both go away pregnant. They’re like the rabbits of the aquatic world, only more prolific. I don’t have any puffers yet, but I thought I could get started with the snails early, so I’d have something to feed my new fish when I did get them.

We went to the pet store and got six of the black snails, thinking it was a good, round number, and a small fish bowl to keep them in. Within a few days, one of them died. (I could tell because there were little “x”s where his eyes should be, and he was rolling around on his back in a decidedly unsnail-like manner.)

The other five, however, thrived. I fed them fish food and lettuce, kept the air stone going, and waited to be a snail godparent.

I waited. And waited. And waited. And still there were no bundles of snail eggs anywhere to be seen. “Perhaps I should play some Barry White,” I told The Wife. “Put on some mood lighting, the whole nine yards.” I swear she’s going to pull a muscle if she keeps rolling her eyes that way.

Finally, a few days ago, she spotted what looked like some brown specks on the side of the bowl. “I think those are snails,” she declared. She pried a speck from the side, and with the aid of a magnifying glass we determined that it was, indeed, a miniature gastropod. Now that we knew what to look for, we scanned the bowl for more. Sure enough, they were everywhere. Apparently my snails had been making whoopee after all, and had managed to successfully conceal their pregnancy from everyone.

I decided to count the babies. It’s difficult, since they’re about the size of poppy seeds, but I managed to get a ballpark figure of about six gazillion.

That’s when we realized that there were white, globular clusters of eggs plastered everywhere as well. I did some quick mental calculations. “If every snail in this bowl is capable of having babies,” I muttered, “and if all of these eggs hatch into viable snails that are also capable of having babies, that means that inside of a month I’m going to be in some serious trouble.”

Which is how I found myself, early this afternoon, performing snail abortions with a Ziploc baggie and a plastic spoon.

Carefully maneuvering my surgical instruments around the bowl, I was precise. I was careful. I was deadly. Gelatinous blobs of snails-to-be were scraped from the side of the bowl and deposited into the bag, while the scads of babies were (mostly) left alone. My killing spree resulted in a mostly clean bowl and a baggie that was quickly deposited in the trash. Now I’m left with merely the original six gazillion + five.

I better get some puffers quick, and they’d better be hungry.