The Triops Adventure Continues

For those of you that were wondering – no, the triops have not met an untimely demise – they are two weeks old now and happily swimming around their tank.

 
As Krystyne would say, “they’re strange little creatures.” But they seem happy enough. We gave them a small soufflé dish with some fine sand to play in – hopefully they’ll lay their eggs in there too so we don’t have to go hunting through the whole tank to gather the next generation. The boys have been tasked to find any spiders in the house to feed the triops snacks.

I haven’t been posting about the triops lately because I’m blogging regularly about living with food allergies at NoNutsForMe.blogspot.com. When Krystyne and I learned that our youngest son, Liam, is deadly allergic to peanuts we felt so lost and confused. Last week was “Allergy Awareness Week”, so we decided to start a blog that would help other parents who have found themselves in the same situation. Hopefully we can also help people understand the difficulties in living with a severe food allergy.

One good place to start is to take the 24-hour allergen-free challenge, and try to live one day carefully avoiding allergen ingredients in everything you eat.

The Triops Adventure, Days 8-10

We moved the triops into the new tank on Friday – we did only have two after all. Since then, the larger of the two has probably doubled in size. Tonight he was starting to split his shell and probably getting ready to grow yet again.

The Triops Adventure, Days 6-7

So the time has finally come to move the little guys into their new home. Today we start acclimating them to the new water, and tomorrow we let them “roam free” (so to speak, as Krys would kill me if I let them out in the house – she still thinks they’ll crawl into our beds at night, like a certain blue lobster – it doesn’t matter that triops can’t live out of water).

As the day progresses I’ve been siphoning out a small bit of water from the new tank and adding it to the hatchery. The little kit says to leave them alone today and pour them out into the new tank tomorrow, but I’m going by the advice of a number of websites that we’ve found on raising triops – such as MyTriops.com.

We’ve also decided to go with a larger tank, since the one with the kit looks a little cramped for something that could grow to 4” long.

Triops housing choices
which would you prefer?

Most recommendations say that each triops needs one litre of water for best oxygenation results. However triops are bottom-dwellers, so floor space is better than ceiling height. A number of owners add triops to their freshwater tropical aquariums to help keep the substrate clean – these things are omnivores, after all.

It’s fun raising pets when the kids can see a major difference in growth on a daily basis – assuming you can get past the three-day waiting period, aka the “hatching phase”. On average these guys should live a couple months, but once they’re gone you just need to dry out the tank and let it sit for two or three weeks. Then just add water and the eggs of the next generation will spring to life.

But we’ll probably harvest the eggs out of the sand in the tank first – we’ve got some teachers that are pretty interested in this experiment for their classes as well.

The Triops Adventure, Days 4-5

These little guys are certainly growing quickly! They are big enough that you can now make out all THREE EYES – hence the name “triops”. They have two regular, compound eyes, plus one eye on the top of their head that senses light – to let them know which way is up.

Of course, I’m unable to post a picture of one of these critters, since we (me, myself and I) chose a jam jar with a diamond pattern on it for a hatchery, and camera lenses don’t seem to like the resultant optics.

next time, a jar with straight sides

Either way, the triops seem to be thriving. Yesterday we gave them their first “solid” food. (Although I guess the fairy shrimp that were in the pond conditioner with them were their real first solid food, but this was the first fish pellets.) As per the instructions we crushed up two pellets and sprinkled a feast of 1/4 of the resulting powder into the jar.

 
triops food – don’t eat it all at once!

Today is the day we should be setting up the full-sized tank, but since I’m going out tonight I figured we should wait until Keeghan and I can do that together … they are supposed to be his, you know. :)

That should be fine anyways, since they’re not scheduled to actually move in to their new home for a few more days.

The Triops Adventure, Days 1-3

As part of Keeghan’s birthday present we got him a “Grow your own Sea Creatures” kit from Scholastic. Remember the Sea Monkeys kits from the 80’s? This is something similar, but instead of brine shrimp you get to grow tadpole shrimp – also known as triops.

Like Sea Monkeys, the eggs come in a dried-out state and you add them to distilled or spring water and wait for them to hatch. We decided to set up the hatchery (a small, clean jam jar) the night before Keeghan's birthday for him, as the eggs are small enough that you are instructed …

Warning: Triops eggs are tiny and will blow away. Do this next step away from drafts and don’t breathe on the eggs.

This way, hopefully, Keeghan would still have Triops to grow. The last three days we’ve kept a vigil to see if we could find any evidence that this actually worked, since it can take up to 3 days for them to hatch. Spotting a baby shrimp is difficult enough, but you can imagine trying to point out eggs in a jam jar that are tiny compared to the tip of a ballpoint pen.

Yesterday we heard an excited yell from Keeghan that he had seen baby triops in the hatchery. At first we couldn’t see a thing other than the pond debris that was added to the water for conditioning, but then we spotted a tiny white animal swimming around in tiny little hops and jumps. IT’S ALIVE!

Since that exuberant birth announcement, we’ve seen another one – maybe two – baby notostracans exploring their nursery.

Information Overload

Are you addicted to information?

How much time do you spend keeping updated? During the course of a normal day – checking email; reading news articles (online or print); texting with family, friends and co-workers; catching up on Facebook posts; tweeting about your latest exploits – there’s a lot of information that comes at us. The skill is in selectively tuning in to some while tuning out others.

We watched a YouTube video last week that claimed an estimate of a week’s worth of information from the New York Times contains more info than someone living in the 1700’s would conceivably learn in a lifetime … and that’s just one source of print material. And yet, we still seem to need more.

But is more necessarily better?

And now you know The Rest of the Story

In my first post I mentioned that I had been sitting in the doctors office. The reason why is that the week before, Joseph twisted his ankle during gym class.

Apparently, he and his friends were running at the wall and climbing one step up the padding, turning around and running back. It seems that when Joseph turned, his decided that it should continue in the previous direction. After "sleeping it off", we took him to the hospital the next morning for x-rays and saw circular swelling on the outside of his ankle.

Thankfully the fracture clinic was running that morning, so we came home with a temporary cast. The follow-up visit to our family doctor provided my initial observations for the blog, and led to a new cast for Joseph, to last for the next four to six weeks.

Joseph's first choice was a hot pink cast, but then he decided on this one. We thought he would have wanted the camouflage pattern, but then figured it would have been too hard to make out the signatures from his friends. So rainbow mix it is.

And now you know the rest of the story.