Thursday, March 03, 2005

Snail Mail - Literally!

Twenty snails arrived in the post today. Honest. I ordered them on-line a few weeks ago but they were apparently delayed by the weather (?). They are perhaps the most unusual thing I have ordered on-line except for a brood of chickens for a family in Africa on behalf of [...]'s nephew at Christmas but naturally the chickens didn’t come to our address.

The snails, some of which are yet to be named, will help to keep the fish tank clean as they trundle along eating algae and fish debris all day long. They also mate when left to their own devices, but with Klutz and Schmuck about, any eggs or offspring are liable to be eaten. In fact, the fish will attack the snails, which is why we’ve got twenty; we expect at least some of them to get sucked from their shells in a gruesome mollusc massacre.

There are two sorts of water snails, ramshorn snails which are kind of ammonite-shaped, flat coils if you like and stagnails which are curvy conical.

I buy most things on-line for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that I don’t get out much (you’d noticed, right?). I buy all my groceries on-line at Tesco, I buy most of my clothes in the world wide jumble sale they call eBay and I would never dream of buying any CDs or DVDs in shops – they’re always so expensive compared to places like 101CD and Play. The first thing I ordered on-line was a bra from Bravissimo and my mother became very anxious about my bra size being accessed by hackers, apparently unconcerned about the security of my credit card number. I have been ordering most things online for seven or eight years now and have had no major problems. But no live organisms before now.

In case anybody else wants to purchase water snails, check out Paul Bromfield Aquatics.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hey, im doing a test do u know if goldfish eat snails?