Forget virgin birth... I have a pet snail that was born out of nothing.

I've had my aquarium set up for months now, and today there was a full-size snail crawling around on the inside. I took this picture of it.

My dad saw me on the webcam staring at my tank, so I got into a discussion with him. I recall our old aquarium at home being overrun with snails at some point. Apparently, they're hermaphroditic and capable of autofertilization... So now that I have one, I'm bound to have a bunch more.

The most likely explaination for the snail miracle birth was that some sort of egg (snails have eggs, right?) was transported in on one of the plants I bought and put in the tank, and that it just took forever for it to grow (and somehow was totally unseen to me or anyone else until today). If that's true, then I suppose this one could be laying eggs that are equally unseeable all over the tank and in a few months I'll be scraping snails off the glass by the dozens and having miniature... whatever the french word is for that snail cuisine... uh I believe its... le yuck.