The Triops have started on solid food. They seemed un-interested in the food at first, but once the pellets swelled up with water the little darlings had a nibble. The instruction booklet says that after a week you can feed them tiny pieces of carrots and fish. I had some Australian Snapper fillets in the fridge for my dinner, so I snipped of a little piece and chopped it in to Triop sized morsels. Ive never tried snapper before, but it must be delicious - judging by the macabre feeding frenzy that ensued. Mental note: be careful about getting fingers in the water when they get a little bigger. Triops don't want to be fed, they want to hunt. Can't just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct!

Update: The snapper was indeed delicious.

My triops hatched today. I am now the proud father of four tiny crustaceans, and there are more on the way. They are barely visible - just little white specs, but I can make out a pair of swimmerets.

Apparently they double in size every day. They are about a millimeter in length at the moment, so by this time tomorrow they will be 2 millimeters long. They live about 60 days, so eventualy they will be 2 to the power of 60 millitmeters in length. Let's see... thats 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 millimeters, 1,152,921,504,606,846 meters or 1,152,921,504,606 kilometers (*). Oh. My. God. We're gonna need a bigger boat.

* For Americans, that's 716,392,209,599 miles