Monkey sea, monkey do beget miracle

If you ever read a comic book from the 60s or 70s, you probably heard of sea monkeys.

Due to the lack of advertising laws, they were promoted as trainable and a wonderful addition to any family.

The truth is they are brine shrimp, which aren’t even a shrimp and are about as trainable as a $21 block of cheddar cheese.

In fact, I’d argue that you could teach the cheese to sit still better than a sea monkey.

We’ve been trying to bring a sea monkey aquarium to life, with varying degrees of success. (Read, we successfully hatched them, and they carked it when we neglected them for the weekend). But as far as pets go, it’s often the weirdest that are the most memorable.

Take Sam, our border collie, when we were kids. Absolutely loved me and my two brothers, would go anywhere with us and was our constant companion. But he absolutely, categorically, completely, hated any other child.

A wave of anger would pass through him should any small person approach his fluffy appealing body, and his grumpiness was such that when teenage me tried to allow a girl to pat him at the park, he angrily growled, spun with a bark, and took off in the opposite direction. Needless to say, a date to Burger King did not follow.

Our family cat Jasper was perfectly normal until she had a litter of kittens. The small furry offspring broke something in young Jasper’s mind, and she forever more had a deep fear of offcast socks.

The mere sight of a worn sock was enough to send her scrambling for the hills in terror. (Perhaps their kittenlike form reminded her what a pain in the bum kids are?)

Then there was Ot Taupie (named because he was from Taupō ) the cockatiel. Try as we might to make him into one of those cool birds that wanted to hop onto your finger, he was much more likely to attack it furiously, lest you go anywhere near him. His happy place was eating a sprig of millet with not a human in sight.

Now, to add to the memories, are about 40 short-lived sea monkeys, and miracle upon miracles, the two that have hatched after the great seamonkey failure of 2022. Wonder if these will learn to sit?