Milla's good friend, Ava, sent a very exciting birthday present to her from San Fransisco: a Triop hatchery! Yup, that's right, we are now trying to hatch us some dinosaur shrimps. They are also called Triops or Sea Monkeys, and when they are done they should hopefully look somewhat like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triops . They are not really dinosaurs, but they have been on earth for about 300 million years. Wrap you brain around this if you can: When these crustaceans first appeared on earth, there were no birds, no dinosaurs, and definitely no humans or other mammals. They are the oldest surviving group of animals.
But for now, they are just tiny little eggs
Can you see them? Just tiny dots on the white paper.
But we have prepared a hatching dish and a little crushed carrot will feed them at first. It should take about a day or so for the first eggs to hatch and after that we need to feed them three times a day; special Triop-food. We are all very excited! The picture below show a grown-up Dinosaur shrimp - a very cute pet!
I think Elliot has already checked on the eggs about 78 times:) Still no swimmers. We will let you know when we have some little Sea Monkeys bopping around in the dish!
Did you manage to grow any triops? We've had a few attempts and were quite successful on the second go. We had a few triops hatch that time but the biggest one ate all the others! He lasted for a few weeks but then I forgot to change his water and found him floating upside down :( Since then we keep managing to grow little triops but they always die before they get about 1cm long. Maybe we'll try and grow some more today :)
ReplyDeleteYou can see our successful triops here: http://www.littlehiccups.net/2012/02/triops-has-three-eyes.html