Today I went to school to check on my fish tank. I had a pretty bad ich infestation before break and wanted to do damage control (ie. replacing the dead fish) before the kids got back and started asking questions about where exactly their favorite fish were. I fed them and was watching them like I often do when I should be doing something far more productive. I put a chunk of food in and then lifted the lid to separate it so the little guys could get some too…often Big Red is too pushy to let the little guys get their fair share.
When I lifted up the lid, I noticed that there was a very large nasty looking cluster of small egg things above on the underside of the hood. Please don’t judge the next few decisions I made, or if you do judge keep in mind the cockroach infection of 2009 and the fact that I watched the old Willy Wonka a lot when I was a kid and this looked like something that would be in the scary acid-trip tunnel on their way to the Inventing Room. Anyway I, being a mature and responsible adult, promptly stuck my finger in it. I was amazed that it was basically a hard outer shell with a gooey inside. This really grossed me out so being convinced that this was some sort of cockroach infestation I poked it with a pencil until it fell into a cup. Then deciding that I didn’t want to have cockroaches in my class (in case they hatched in the trash can) I went to wash them down the sink, but that idea was dismissed when I realized that I would have to squish them down the drain and I didn’t really want to touch this mass again…especially since it was probably cockroach babies waiting to jump out onto me and give me enough fodder for nightmares that I would never sleep again. After eschewing the drain and the trash can, I decided that I would throw them outside and hope they died in the elements. I opened the door (that won’t stay open) and was holding on to it as I flung the mass out of the cup and it ever so gracefully flew across the sidewalk and splattered right before the rail.
Having convinced myself that the impact would probably kill whatever was growing inside I returned to the tank and all of a sudden remembered that before Christmas break the snails in my tank had been “playing” a lot. Apparently, I had been inadvertently letting my students watch hours of snail porn. They thought it was funny how one liked to ride on the other one’s shell. According to wikianswers this is how they mate and the large glob of eggs were probably snail eggs. How was I to know that this type of snail lays their eggs out of the water…after all they live in the water all the time!
"Look the little brown one is riding on the yellow one."
"They must be good friends to be playing so nicely"
So in less than a minute my freaking out because of the gooey cockroach eggs turned into freaking out because I had probably killed all of the little baby snails that my snails had so lovingly conceived in a public venue. So then I went back outside armed with a piece of paper and the cup that was previously mentioned. I scraped the blob (now not quite so cluster shaped and quite a bit more slimy) and fixed what I hope will be a nice little home for the little guys in 2-3 more weeks. That is if they survive the poking, screaming, pushing, flinging, scraping, and relocating.
This is what the eggs looked liked. This is not my image as you can imagine mine look a lot more like this...
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