Dark truth behind iconic childhood staple Sea Monkeys

If your childhood came at a certain time then there's a pretty good chance you were given Sea Monkeys as a birthday present.

Bred from different species of brine shrimp, many a young child received the gift of a tank to fill with water and three packets.

One would be a 'water purifier', the next would be the Sea Monkey eggs and the last one was a pouch of food with a little spoon to pour it into the tank.

As long as you remember to feed them and don't knock over the tank you get your own mini-aquarium of Sea Monkeys.

You know, dear reader, in my younger days I used to have Sea Monkeys as pets and it was actually quite a joy to see them grow and develop.

Amazon

That is until a couple of years later when the biggest one started hogging all of the food, resulting in the others dying until he was the only one left.

Then he died of old age and also possibly loneliness, and since all of the baby Sea Monkeys had starved because of their greedy dad that was the end of my keeping Sea Monkeys.

What makes them so good as a gift is that if you freeze, completely dry or remove oxygen from Sea Monkeys their bodies basically shut down for a time, meaning when you put them into the water they'll come back to life again.

You're not so much pouring eggs into the water to hatch as you are waking up the Sea Monkeys.

This means you can actually gift someone the Sea Monkeys without worrying too much about how they're doing before being unwrapped

However, the popular practice pet has a pretty dark truth behind it, as they were invented by an American man by the name of Harold von Braunhut.

Wikimedia Commons

Von Braunhut was an inventor of a number of zany gifts for children including X-Ray specs, a monster card that would grow hair when you added water and the 'invisible goldfish' which was just a fishbowl and some food.

Oh, and he was also a massive white supremacist.

Sorry folks, but the inventor of Sea Monkeys bought weapons for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly attended neo-Nazi groups.

He didn't try to hide it either, as in an interview where he made racist statements he then said: "You know what side I'm on. I don't make any bones about it."

Yep, childhood ruined - sorry, folks.

Topics: Animals, Weird, Racism

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker