I have this 10 gallon aquarium in my kitchen / living room. These two newts kinda came with the house, so I upgraded their aquarium from this little piece of plastic and got them two gold fish to get anxious about, a couple big snails, and a few plants, one of which had this these baby snails on it: lagniappe!

The big snails died during hurricane gustav while the power was out. But the little snails would appear from out of nowhere every so often, then disappear in the rocks again. For a while I thought there was only one, I saw them so rarely.

I’ve also got a piece of driftwood and a rock in there, things I had found years ago and had kept on my desk, and a Mason jar we found in the cabinet when we moved in. About a month and a half ago I was standing over the aquarium looking in and noticed a little clear blob on the driftwood. I scraped it up on the end of my knife and saw tiny black dots in it, so i turned the mason jar right side up with the open end up out of the water. I dropped the eggs in the jar and let it sit. I figured if this blob really was eggs, whatever it was would have a better chance of surviving in a closed environment.

About a week went by and I didn’t see anything in the jar except for small bits of algae forming on the bottom. Perhaps the blob had just disintegrated and it was nothing. Who knew. Two more weeks went by and I started to notice that stuff was moving around in the algae. I pulled the jar out of the water and saw tiny little snails moving around the inside of the glass. The next week they were big enough that I could count them… there were 19 or 20. I was pretty excited about all of these snails. Obviously.

My brother and his family came in town for Christmas and we all watched their progress. In the two weeks that they were here the biggest snails got to be about 3mm, which I thought was actually about the size of the baby snails that I’d first gotten for free on the plants.

I got anxious to let the snails out into the wild, so one day after lunch I decided I’d turn the mason jar back on its side. I faced it toward a pile of rocks that buried two plants, figuring the snails would get lost in the leaves. I sat down to read for 20 minutes, then looked back up at the aquarium wondering if the snails had begun to come out at all. But they hadn’t, the goldfish had found their way into the jar.

How about I conclude in haiku? Obviously.

Twenty baby snails,
goldfish caught you unawares.
Now you are just one.