Thursday, February 25, 2010

A Lesson in Sex

I bet THAT got your attention!  No, I am not doing a racy post.  Sorry to disappoint you.  But I do have a kid and have to keep this clean.

We have a fish tank where almost all our fish die but the snails are loving it.  We bought one snail then Son found another one in the river and added that to the tank.  Somewhere another one materialized which Son took to school for their tank.  So we were back to 2.  Until this week.  All of a sudden we found this:



Now WHERE did that come from? 
(I suck at taking pictures into the tank.)



We haven't bought any new fish and Son hasn't been playing in the river. So I checked the internet to see if we have baby producing snails.  Here is what I found out:

The Snail is a hermaphrodite. This means that the snail is both male and female. All hermaphroditic snails can lay eggs. The Snail can "mate" with himself and thus only one can reproduce in an aquarium or pond. he also breeds sexually as often as possible. Most snails lay eggs but some, like the trapdoor snail, give live birth. Trapdoor snails and a few other species of snails (apple, golden inca, four horned, etc.) are not hermaphrodites. They can only reproduce sexually.

Ok.  So it seems that my 2 snails are reproducing or it could be just one of them.  What fun!  Escargo anyone?

11 comments:

  1. Maybe you need to have "The Talk" with your pets, lol

    Can I call you Grandmom now??

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  2. err...definitely a different feel than i was led to believe by the title. lol. sounds slimy...smiles.

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  3. A friend of mine has some water-snails, and they just look like stones! But yes, I looked it up and some are hermaphrodites, so they could be having all the fun and keeping it to themselves!

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  4. That was an interesting read.
    I'm following now.
    (so sorry I thought I was already following you,)
    Betty xx

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  5. I like my escargo sauteed with butter and garlic. Be right over. (wink)

    The Old Silly

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  6. That is crazy! I don't really wanna go there, but I will.

    You know what it's called when human beings try to reproduce with themselves! Luckily, it only works for snails.

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  7. Well Ames I did not know that. I have had many fish tanks over the years and snails were never included in the water with the fish. We had turtles but nope, no snails. So now I had a sex lesson which was very informative and I can't believe it took me till now to learn this. I guess you are never too old to learn something new huh?

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  8. That was pretty interesting!! Wonder how many more you will get!!

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  9. Okay. That is very interesting. I love learning new random facts!!

    :-)

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  10. Wow. What an education for you and your family. What are you going to do with lots of snails?

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