microaffections: Last summer, my 6yo asked if we could have pet snails and then eventually informed
microaffections: Last summer, my 6yo asked if we could have pet snails and then eventually informed me that he’d already been keeping 6 in a cup (covered) in his room for a day. He was already pretty attached. We looked up caring for snails and bought a cage and a few other supplies and put his snails in there. He and his sisters named them. It was all very exciting. For about 2 weeks. Then, shock! All snail care fell to me. Which is fine. I actually like watching them. They’re surprisingly responsive to stimuli and social with each other. I recently discovered that I can hand-feed them. Like… they’re snails. That shouldn’t be a thing. Anyway, occasionally my daughters like to go out and pick up new snails after it rains and add them to the bunch, and I figure as long as we’re not killing them, and I’m not suddenly budgeting extra veggies just for them, fine. So now we have about 15 snails. Oh, and a roly poly. All along, I’ve been low key hoping/fearing that the snails will have babies. On one hand, that’s something you’d never get to see on your own out in the world, right? How are you gonna find snail eggs? But on the other hand, we already have 15 snails, so… Welp. I noticed the world’s tiniest snail on a slice of cucumber the other day and knew it was way too small for my daughters to have picked it up outside. So I started poking around. Y’all. There are three different holes where these damned snails have laid eggs. About a dozen in each hole. (Which is actually a small number. Garden snails can lay EIGHTY EGGS in one clutch.) I am… full of trepidation about this. Frankly, I’m sort of horrified by the knowledge that every single snail in that cage is capable of laying eggs since they are hermaphrodites. I see a Great Snail Release Day in our future at some point, but for now… I guess we’re about to have a lot of snails. I just found a fourth clutch of at least 15 eggs. This is very troubling. -- source link
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