Solomon the Invincible
Solomon died yesterday. That unkillable neotenic aquatic salamander who's survived eight years of living with me (in joint custody with oranchina), after living in California, Oregon, and Washington, through twelve moves [we're right in the middle of the thirteenth now] - most by car or moving truck, but he's gone on at least two plane rides as carry-on [right through the x-ray when he flew with me!])... after having outlived his wicked smart sister/mate Ella (who we lost in salamander-birth [egg-laying, I guess] for her second brood), and not-so-smart (but Mighty and Viscious [for a toothless, clawless salamander], and almost completely albino) Thor (who clouded up the entire 29-gallon tank with weird algae-fungus when he died, nearly taking Solomon and Ella with him).
He even outlived his and Ella's entire first brood - most of the thirty or fourty eggs didn't make it to hatching, and most of those that did didn't survive to adolescence, but the three who did grow up to have a life were special in their own right: while Solomon never lived in the same tank with Gigantor, Jesus, or Yeltsin ('cuz he'd have eaten them up Yum!), I'm sure he gave them as much love as his little knot of ganglia could muster.
He outlived Alan Greenspan, my poor hot-weather lizard, who didn't handle the cold of Seattle that well. And the unnamed tropical frogs who caught a bad case of fungus of some sort.
Solomon survived jumping out of oranchina's tank (for who knows what crazy reason), landing on the floor all shrivelled and dried up, laying there all straining his rudimentary lungs (evolved for just such a reason, I suppose: when the climate gets hot and dry and their water goes away, their gills shrink away and their lungs grow to compensate and they can metamorphose into land-based salamanders which resemble their close relatives, the Tiger Salamander (ambystoma tigrinum), but the stress usually kills them soon after) until oranchina came home and found him - washed him off thinking he was already dead, and put him back in the tank, and he was fine!
He's lived through hot spells (way beyond their tolerance levels for non-running water), gone a week or even two without food at times, if I was negligent (axolotls suffer from some serious obesity if they get to eat too much, and that can shorten their lifespans far below their usual 2-5 years), his arms and legs were barely even stumps when we first got him (eaten off by the hermit crabs and snails put in the same tank as him by the axolotl-uneducated pet-store manager we bought him from), so I'd gotten so used to the little guy handling just about anything, that I'd pretty much assumed he'd surpass the record lifespan of that axolotl who made it a quarter of century in captivity in France...
But today, the poor water quality of the place in Bothell that amberphlame and I are crashing at 'till the 1st seems the most likely culprit for depriving this world of most likely it's most invincible salamander (well that, plus old age, plus there's that tiny fragment of my irrational brain which says that he could finally let go now that there's another funky weird animal in my life [a post on delicate-princess Abbey {who arrived wednesday night} is forthcoming], no matter how little it makes sense to ascribe extra-sensory powers to a beast who barely has *regular* sensory perception).
I was pretty devastated when I realized that he'd been so quickly taken down by some sort of cloacal infection (he'd been swimming around fine yesterday). I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye while he was still alive (although I'm really glad that even though we'd not hung out in almost a year or so, oranchina got to see him last weekend [and call out the low-toned call of "COME UP TO... the SURFACE!" to which Ella first figured out was the food call, and he figured out soon after]).
To say he will be much missed is both a cliche and an understatement. There have been precious few constants in my life over the past decade, and having a silly little fluffy-gill-headed weird-unhealing-produced hole-through-the-tail creature who people would say "WTF is *THAT*?!?" about was one of them.
Goodbye, Solomon the Invincible.
He even outlived his and Ella's entire first brood - most of the thirty or fourty eggs didn't make it to hatching, and most of those that did didn't survive to adolescence, but the three who did grow up to have a life were special in their own right: while Solomon never lived in the same tank with Gigantor, Jesus, or Yeltsin ('cuz he'd have eaten them up Yum!), I'm sure he gave them as much love as his little knot of ganglia could muster.
He outlived Alan Greenspan, my poor hot-weather lizard, who didn't handle the cold of Seattle that well. And the unnamed tropical frogs who caught a bad case of fungus of some sort.
Solomon survived jumping out of oranchina's tank (for who knows what crazy reason), landing on the floor all shrivelled and dried up, laying there all straining his rudimentary lungs (evolved for just such a reason, I suppose: when the climate gets hot and dry and their water goes away, their gills shrink away and their lungs grow to compensate and they can metamorphose into land-based salamanders which resemble their close relatives, the Tiger Salamander (ambystoma tigrinum), but the stress usually kills them soon after) until oranchina came home and found him - washed him off thinking he was already dead, and put him back in the tank, and he was fine!
He's lived through hot spells (way beyond their tolerance levels for non-running water), gone a week or even two without food at times, if I was negligent (axolotls suffer from some serious obesity if they get to eat too much, and that can shorten their lifespans far below their usual 2-5 years), his arms and legs were barely even stumps when we first got him (eaten off by the hermit crabs and snails put in the same tank as him by the axolotl-uneducated pet-store manager we bought him from), so I'd gotten so used to the little guy handling just about anything, that I'd pretty much assumed he'd surpass the record lifespan of that axolotl who made it a quarter of century in captivity in France...
But today, the poor water quality of the place in Bothell that amberphlame and I are crashing at 'till the 1st seems the most likely culprit for depriving this world of most likely it's most invincible salamander (well that, plus old age, plus there's that tiny fragment of my irrational brain which says that he could finally let go now that there's another funky weird animal in my life [a post on delicate-princess Abbey {who arrived wednesday night} is forthcoming], no matter how little it makes sense to ascribe extra-sensory powers to a beast who barely has *regular* sensory perception).
I was pretty devastated when I realized that he'd been so quickly taken down by some sort of cloacal infection (he'd been swimming around fine yesterday). I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye while he was still alive (although I'm really glad that even though we'd not hung out in almost a year or so, oranchina got to see him last weekend [and call out the low-toned call of "COME UP TO... the SURFACE!" to which Ella first figured out was the food call, and he figured out soon after]).
To say he will be much missed is both a cliche and an understatement. There have been precious few constants in my life over the past decade, and having a silly little fluffy-gill-headed weird-unhealing-produced hole-through-the-tail creature who people would say "WTF is *THAT*?!?" about was one of them.
Goodbye, Solomon the Invincible.