The sea monkey handbook will try to brainwash you into thinking it's really "As Easy As 1-2-3," but don't fall into that trap. Anyone who finds a way to raise sea monkeys in three steps is going to inadvertently raise terrorist sea monkeys, or at least sea monkeys that that drink, smoke, and have premarital sex while on dangerous combinations of potentially lethal drugs. Our sea monkeys were raised in a loving and caring household, free of fighting.
The nuts and bolts of making sea monkeys exist in the first place, however, can be condensed to three steps:
Step
One: Purify the Water
An overly long and irritating task, you must purify the water for approximately 1.5 days. Sea monkeys can't live in regular tap water, because of the harmful calcium and iron oxide deposits, so you have to use the Water Purifier. It magically eliminates these chemicals, and replaces them with....you guessed it: Fun.
Step
Two: Add Life
This is the part when you really feel like you're playing God. Once the instant life packet is emptied into the water, they spring into existence! Several of them do hatch the first day, and although they're no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, they're still very, very interesting. It's hard to tell exactly where they are since they're tiny white dots, but the instruction book has a helpful hint: "Stir the water up, and if you look closely, amongst all the swirling particles, you can see some of the particles swimming against the current!" Apparently our sea monkeys were weaklings, because they were quickly sucked to the bottom of the tank by our column of swirling water. All except one - an unusually large, orange one. In honor of Space Ghost, we named him Banjo, and declared him "king of the sea monkeys." But truth be known, underneath it all, we were secretly afraid of a sea monkey strong enough to out-swim a raging torrent, and turn orange at will. Soon, we know, he might turn on his makers.
Step Three: Use the Growth Food
The growth food comes with a serving spoon with two ends that are different in size for feeding sea monkeys of differing ages. Clever, indeed. The book points out very clearly that you shouldn't try and feed them fish food, because they won't eat it, so stop thinking that you can find a way around buying more and more sea monkey food.
Once your sea monkeys begin
to grow, you can do all kinds of fun things with them. If you can tell them
apart, you can name them. Or, better yet, you can play games with them. When I
first heard of the games you can play with your sea monkeys, I was skeptical,
but then I learned you can play baseball and scrabble with them, and I was
amazed. I'm not sure how exactly, but it had something to do with which
direction the sea monkey swam and how fast. That's when we learned about
training sea monkeys, and sea monkey fighting.
You can apparently "train" sea monkeys to do all sorts of things. In reality, you don't train them at all, obviously, but you can change the temperature and lighting of their habitat to make them behave differently. Also, you can feed them different food to make them do things such as go insane, or mate (the mating food is called something like "Love Helper," though I think it's just more eggs that hatch later, fooling the unwary consumer into thinking their sea monkeys are having a giant aquatic orgy, which would serve as a mild redeeming factor for a waste of 7 dollars.
On To Part 2 - Sea Monkeys of Total Annihilation