Microscopic Mystery: What This Man Found Inside Sea Monkeys Will Leave You Speechless

Remember those Sea Monkeys we all had as kids—the tiny “pets” that crowded our windowsills and, let’s be honest, often outlived their welcome by barely a week? Well, imagine peering way beyond the little plastic tank, deep into their microscopic world, only to find… nematodes wriggling around like uninvited guests crashing the party. I mean, who knew our nostalgic brine shrimp buddies were hosting such a creepy crawl beneath the surface? And while some folks have gone all out—like the legendary ‘Sea-Monkey Dude’ who built a colony housing thousands—the truth about these quirky creatures and their oddball inventor might just make you rethink that childhood gift forever. Curious about the gunk and secrets lurking beneath your ancient fishbowl? You’re in for a wild ride. LEARN MORE

A man made a pretty shocking discovery when he decided to put his Sea Monkeys under a microscope.

Yeah, those are a blast from the past, aren’t they? Plenty of us grew up keeping the little ‘pets’, often on the kitchen windowsill much to our parents’ disgust.

And they didn’t tend to live particularly long, floating about in their little ‘tanks.’

Although, the ‘Sea-Monkey Dude’ did end up creating the ‘world’s largest Sea Monkey colony’, housing thousands of the pets.

But while many of us may have kept the weird little things, it’s fair to say few of us even actually understood what they were. Basically, they’re just brine shrimp, sold as eggs and hatching when they’re added to water.

And this YouTuber decided to start putting his under a microscope to get a better look at them.

Not quite what every parent wanted on the windowsill. (YouTube/Picocosmos)

Picocosmos particularly wanted to see what was going on with the gunk and algae growing from the bottom. And when he put some of it under, he found something that ‘kind of creeped him out a bit.’

What he found wriggling around down there were nematodes, tiny little parasitic roundworms that live all over the world, including beneath his Sea Monkey tank.

The ‘pets’ doing a bit more once they get to be six months old, as they might start fighting over who gets who.

If after about six months of having them you see a pair of Sea Monkeys stuck together and only one of them has whiskers. then that’s a mating pair and you might expect more Sea Monkeys to appear in the near future.

But if there’s anything you ought to be ‘creeped out’ by when it comes to Sea Monkeys, it’s the man who invented them, one Harold von Braunhut.

Creepy. (YouTube/Picocosmos)

As well as deciding that Sea Monkeys would be a great children’s present, he also invented a number of other gifts for kids including X-Ray specs, a monster card that grew hair when you put it in the water and the ‘invisible goldfish’, which was just an empty fishbowl and some fish food.

It’s also said Braunhut bought weapons for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly attended neo-Nazi group meets.

The inventor of Sea Monkeys being a massive white supremacist wasn’t something he even tried to hide, when asked about it in an interview he once said: “You know what side I’m on. I don’t make any bones about it.”

Hmm, creepy toys from creepy guys.