They’re like fish - pretty, transfixing, calming things to look at - but you don’t have to clean the tank. They don’t stain the carpet, rack up vet bills or, really, do much of anything. They really are pets, even if they don’t bark at the mailman, play fetch or, like a certain cat, curl up on your face while you sleep. It’s that kind of thing that keeps me in the strange thrall of Sea-Monkeys. Smelly green powder goes in, and babies, mere monkey specks, promptly appear. But they also reproduce and replenish their populations in sly ways, such as lacing the Growth Food with fresh eggs that hatch instantly when I feed the creatures every five days or so. The Sea-Monkey world is like an undersea ant farm, without the dirt and without, in my case when I tried to cultivate an ant farm, mass annihilation. A month later, they are happy, confident, independent and plump - about the size of fingernail clippings - everything you want in healthy offspring. Within minutes pencil-dash creatures were zigzagging the water, itsy, white, herky-jerky things you might see under a microscope - autonomous amoebas swimming on their own and doing gleeful backflips. I filled the tank with tepid tap water, churned in the Water Purifier and waited the prescribed 24 hours before dumping in the Monkey eggs. For $12.98 at Amazon, I got The Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys Ocean-Zoo, which the package promises “The World’s Only Instant Pets!”®. (I’m apeshit for these monkeys, you might say.) Watching the film, I was prepared to order the small Sea-Monkey tank that comes with Water Purifier, Instant-Life Crystals (eggs) and Growth Food packets lickety-split, I was so excited seeing again the novelty pets I had owned so many times over the decades. (But let’s pretend they’re actually otherworldly, kinda creepy alien demon creatures, the love-children of Poseidon and a mermaid - or of Aquaman and a king prawn. The last time I reported on Sea-Monkeys - here - I had just watched a memory-rattling short film about the fanciful water simians, which are actually simple but neato-to-watch brine shrimp. Dozens of them flit and twirl about in a plastic tank that’s at best seven inches tall. The Sea-Monkeys are doing swimmingly, thank you, flapping and flying through speckled salt water, pumping fleshy wings and wagging long pink tails like bitty aquatic dragons.
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