Well, this morning I thought I really had killed Ajax (the snail, remember?). Once again he was sort of floating around… but THIS time, he had a Bit floating out behind him! I was convinced it was his guts. A little while later I got James and we had another look: he was on the bottom of the tank, still with the Bit -which was sort of grey with a red bit – hanging out. I was getting ready to go to a wedding, so I didn’t actually have heaps of time to be worrying about the snail. Nonetheless I came back a few minutes later to keep watching, to see what might happen. What happened is that this time he seemed to have something different, greyish, hanging out the other side of him. Because he was on the bottom of the tank I could actually see underneath him, and notice that the red bit was now underneath. As I watched, I realised that the bit seemed to be staying in one place while the snail moved – it looked like the snail was simply moving over it. This is distressing, if you think it’s his guts. I called James, and we watched a little longer… and then the snail was completely off the thing. We looked at it closely. Rather than guts, it looked far more like the carcass of a neon. Frantically, we counted. Ten neons present and accounted for. What the heck was that, then?! We have no idea. Suffice to say, the snail is just fine (of course). It was very, very odd.

When I got home from the wedding, James said he’d been watching the tank a bit (he has come to quite like the snail), and reported everything was fine. He asked whether I had fished out the ‘body’, but I hadn’t… so we don’t know where it is, because it sure isn’t where we left it this morning.