Sea Monkeys: Nature, red in tooth and claw
Sea Monkey Update: 4/29 @ 10:41pm
Click to see them swim!
The sea monkeys seemed noticably bigger today! I could see the heads and tails much more easily. There are a lot of them swimming around, I'd estimate maybe 30-50? According to the sea monkey package there are 75 eggs in the packet, and only a few end up making it to adulthood due to survival of the fittest. However when I mentioned this to my roommate she thought it was mean to do that, and asked why not just put a few eggs in the tank at the start. I do see her point. However, since one female can lay 300 eggs in a sitting and do so every four days, my compassionate efforts may ultimately go to waste.
Unless I make sure to divide all the babies up into new tanks to ensure the highest rate of survival. However this is obviously impractical. Since in nature the artemia (and other prey species) have evolved this method of enormous numbers of offspring in order to increase survival rates, it doesn't seem all that incompassionate to let the same thing happen here. But then again, no one would want to do that with a brood of mice.
Click to see them swim!
The sea monkeys seemed noticably bigger today! I could see the heads and tails much more easily. There are a lot of them swimming around, I'd estimate maybe 30-50? According to the sea monkey package there are 75 eggs in the packet, and only a few end up making it to adulthood due to survival of the fittest. However when I mentioned this to my roommate she thought it was mean to do that, and asked why not just put a few eggs in the tank at the start. I do see her point. However, since one female can lay 300 eggs in a sitting and do so every four days, my compassionate efforts may ultimately go to waste.
Unless I make sure to divide all the babies up into new tanks to ensure the highest rate of survival. However this is obviously impractical. Since in nature the artemia (and other prey species) have evolved this method of enormous numbers of offspring in order to increase survival rates, it doesn't seem all that incompassionate to let the same thing happen here. But then again, no one would want to do that with a brood of mice.
