What are Seamonkeys
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
You’ve seen them depicted in ads as colorful little pink characters with giant smiles and tiny little crowns on their heads. In reality, though, what are you bringing out when you open those packages?
They’re known more scientifically as brine shrimp. Members of the Arthropoda phylum, brine shrimp are typically found in salt lakes or evaporation flats (generally places with a higher-than-usual salt concentration). However the specific creatures found in the boxes are actually carefully bred hybrids, made to last longer than the average brine shrimp. They’re treated in a lab, not captured in the wild and shipped out.
The key to their marketability is their biological propensity towards entering suspended animation whenever they’ve been removed from their natural environment of salt. They’ll emerge from this state quite rapidly if placed back into the proper mixture of salt and water.
The packages generally assure buyers that their new sea monkeys can last up to a year. This is true, but only to a point; it means that the colony itself will probably last for two years before dying out. The separate monkeys have comparably shorter life spans.