Meet Baby Socrates

I walked into Jon’s office, looked down at the bed under his table that used to be Red’s and is now where Bud sleeps and saw my snail Socrates next to a rawhide twist.

The day before I told Jon that I hadn’t seen Socrates, which was unusual.

We have somewhere between 7 to 9  snails in the tank (I’ve actually lost count of them all) many of them I don’t see for days when they’re busy, doing what snails do, in the plants at the back of the tank.

But Socrates was always up front, doing amazing things, putting on a show, it seemed.

When I first saw Socrates’ blue spiral shell on the dog bed I got a picture in my mind of a cartoon Bud standing on the table in front of the fish tank, his front leg reaching into the tank, fishing out the snail.

The truth is, sometimes snail will leave a fish tank.   But they can only live for an hour or so outside water.

My first thought was suicide, then I imagined Socrates, bored with his surroundings, looking for a bigger more interesting tank to live in.

I’ve never had a snail do this before, but when I looked into it, I found that sometimes a Mystery Snail will leave the tank to lay eggs since they don’t lay eggs underwater.

After my initial shock of finding  Socrates on the dog bed, I scooped him up and put him in the tank, hoping he hadn’t been out of the water too long and was still alive.

Eventually, I accepted that he was dead, and put him in the flowerpot outside my studio.  He’s still there.

I’m assuming what really happened is Bud found Socrates on the floor under the tank, picked him up and brought him to his bed to chew on.

A couple of days later, a few more snails came in the mail (Jon ordered them).  As I took them out of the plastic container they came in and put them in water, one immediately stuck his head out, looking around.

He’s just a little thing, a lot smaller than the Socrates who died, but he hasn’t stopped moving since he got here.