The Case of the Disappearing Snail

In an earlier post, I talked about my new hobby, playing around with an aquarium. This has been coming along very nicely. I had about 7 fish, 2 frogs (that don't need to breathe air??), and 2 snails.

The snails were rather large - one was white and one was blue. At one point, the blue snail starting hitching a ride on top of the white snail. Now what kind of behavior was that - exactly the kind you think. Obviously, the white snail was a female and the blue snail was a male. He turned out to be quite a horny bastard - constantly hitching a ride. The white snail laid eggs several times. Since I really didn't want any baby snails, I always cleaned the eggs out of the tank. Snails actually lay the eggs outside of the water, so they would be on the inside top of the cover.

Did you know there is a whole community of message boards that discusses aquarium behavior and what not??? Trust me, after reading some of the posts, I'm convinced these people do not have a life. But, to confirm what I thought, I searched through a message board to find out that indeed the snails were mating. I actually started to find this very annoying and gave my blue snail away to a friend of mine - yes, a home for wayward aquarium life!

So, now I'm down to one snail - the white one. This is a very active snail and is constantly moving around the tank keeping it clean. I really liked that snail alot. One day I came home from work and the snail was missing. This snail was about 1.5 to 2 inches wide - you can't miss it in the tank and there is no where for it to hide - although I looked everywhere. Well, perhaps the snail floated out of the top of the tank as it would crawl all the way to the top on many occasions. So I searched all around the floor and behind any furniture - no snail....

I have some girls who come to clean my house every other week (and trust me, I totally realize how fortunate I am to be able to do this). My best guess is that the snail did float out of the tank and perhaps it went up the vacuum or they picked it up and failed to tell me they threw it away. At any rate, I felt like they would think I was nuts if I questioned them about it. Like, hey, what did you do with my snail???

So, it will forever be a mystery unless some day it turns up all rotted somewhere in my house. The case of the missing snail....