I am taking care of two fish this weekend. One is a nice, respectable goldfish. It’s orange and black, it lives alone in a bubbling tank with some seaweed and a little fake wooden log to swim through. It eats a few pellets of food every few days.
The other has three eyes, and it eats its companions.
Oh, the triops. Fine, it’s actually a crustacean, but it does swim in a little bowl at a friend’s house. It—along with several others—arrived there unexpectedly as a charming souvenir, brought by someone who now refers to it as “creepy.” At first the triops seemed like a modern day sea monkey—cute-ish, small, and not likely to survive for very long.
True, most of them did not survive. In October, there were three medium-sized ones. Then one of them ate another, while my friend looked on in horror. Then there were two. The small one seemed very feisty and inedible. Then one day, the smaller one was gone, too, and little triops leftovers were floating around the floor.
I know some animals eat members of their own species. I’m cool with that (as long as it’s not me). It’s also perfectly fine that this particular species is a hermaphrodite, and has internal, self-fertilizing eggs. (Although if this particular triops internally fertilized its eggs and hatched while under my charge, I’d probably freak out.) I think it’s the eyes that really make me squeamish.
The eyes are what gives the triops its name. You can see all of them through the translucent shell, and it feels like the triops is giving you the stink-eye, as if I might be its next disgusting course (despite its being about the length of my knuckle).
I confess that when I first went over, alone, to feed it, I dropped its little crushed pellets of dried shrimp in the bowl, flinched, and backed away.
The next time, I brought reinforcements. Always lukewarm about the goldfish they’d won at the fair, these support feeders were suddenly fascinated by their new responsibility. One of them put his nose an inch away from the glass to watch the pulsing of the triops’ gills. Another climbed on the countertop to be near it, nearly stuck his face in the bowl, and laughed delightedly when the triops zig-zagged around the bowl after its food floated down.
I had to answer questions, which means I had to look things up, so that I now know more things, things that sort of balance out the creepy eyes and the cannibalism. The triops breathes through its legs. There’s a particular species of triops that’s been basically the same since the Triassic.
And the triops helps us out, in many ways. In Africa, triops eat mosquito larvae that carry West Nile virus; in Japan, they provide weed control in rice paddies. In fact, they eat almost anything—bacteria, carrots, lunch meat—including other triops.
There are a lot of things that are perfectly pleasant, but maybe it’s good to keep an eye on the things that disgust me. Some of them may turn out to be fascinating—other things might require a different kind of response. It can be easy to be lulled by Fishy, the content goldfish. But the triops that now demands my attention? Maybe it’s fitting that the boys who live with the triops have named it Cutie Pootie.
Images:
Triops closeup by Karsten Grabow via Wikimedia Commons
Triops in the sand by Kamil Porembiński via Wikimedia Commons