You may have wondered what has happened in the past few weeks. Indeed there has been no news and an important story was halted right where things were getting exciting. Dear reader, I do apologize. Something curious has occurred the day after part one of Bibliotheca Echidna was written. In fact the events had already been set in motion before but were not apparent until that day. As you know Hubbard keeps a miniature zoo in a greenhouse-like construction behind the watch workshop. In this enclosure he keeps many a strange creature, some of which have already passed these pages and some which will surely follow. This tale is about one such extremity of nature. Hubbard's ambition has never been to re-create the typical Natural History Museum exhibit, where you walk past rows and rows fish tanks and bleak skeletons. No instead his goal was and is to replicate a small portion of rainforest inside an artificial glass enclosure. A bubble of sorts we now call the backyard vivarium. For this ever evolving project he needs not only plants and animals but food as well, large quantities of food. Ironically it is the food which is stored and arranged much like the displays of the typical Victorian museum.

Besides reptiles and birds and frogs, Hubbard also keeps a certain amount of tropical fish. Most of which arrive in the form of either eggs or very small young fish. He has managed to breed successfully a type of Discus fish that is smaller and much redder than the typical variety, it is the so called 'Symphysodon Discus Discus'. These animals are kept in a part of the greenhouse resembling a section of a river. When the elaborate greenhouse construction was first built, a trench was kept at the same level as the foundations. Other parts were filled up, which now forms the soil you walk on. With rocks and dead tree branches a river now freely flowed where once a large void looked into the earth. Directly next to the artificial river, cleverly blocked by plants and tree trunks on either side to conceal the fact that it abruptly stopped on either side of the vivarium, a small room was hollowed out. In this room a glass plate gave a spectacular view into the body of tropical water. If you entered the greenhouse from the watch shop you would have to make an immediate left to find the staircase leading to the observation room. You would otherwise not notice that there existed another space below the little pathway guiding you through a myriad of vines, tropical flowers, dead branches and leafs. On many evenings, Helen could be found down below, staring at the fish and bustling life. It must have been completely alien for a woman normally used to the cold plains of Northern Russia.

In the large attic above our house, arranged in rows and rows of glass and metal tanks, we breed, grow and nurture the foods needed to keep the transplanted forest alive. Each row contains specific food groups. There are tanks dedicated to growing small plants that replace those in the vivarium that do not live by their very nature a long life. Next to the plant cases there are the reptile and frog food sources, which are mostly crickets and other noisy insects, suitable for snakes and arachnids. The center rows are for breeding small fish and water bugs. These we feed to the larger carnivores and even birds. On the far right is a row dedicated to keeping sets of tropical fish that are quarantined to keep them from the river because they have diseases or fungi. All this life is kept under strict observation and next to every tank is a chart that tracks how the plants and animals are doing. The heat is also a lot higher because according to Hubbard that is the ideal replication of how young animals and also humans like to grow up when they are only embryos. I'm not sure what embryos are but they sound quite frightening from what I gather of the explanations my mentor gives me.

A day before I finished the first part of what will be an elaborate description of the Bibliotheca Echidna, we received as per usual a box of various eggs we use to breed so called Daphnia. These are tiny water bugs or water lice that we feed to our tropical fish. You would think that these ugly creatures are disgusting but if you see how the discus fish attack them you wonder what's special about them. We receive the Daphnia and other foods such as brine shrimp in cardboard boxes. Each box contains folded papers holding a small number of dried eggs. Ultimately Hubbard hopes to breed our own food supply but for now we buy them from various vendors out in the country. But I digress, in the box in question there were as usual a number of pieces of paper, folded into small envelopes like ones you would buy medications in from an apothecary. It was early afternoon and I decided to use part of the eggs immediately in our incubators in the attic. Might as well work on our food supply since the store had been extremely slow so far.

When I entered the attic I realized I must not come here often during the day. In the vaulted roof are large windows providing a critical supply of light for the tiny crustaceans and plants. Normally I check the tanks at night and do not observe what magnificent view the collection of organisms can create when lighted properly. Again through the usage of lenses and mirrors, each tank is showered in a strong light. There are tanks containing clouds of thousands of Daphnia, aquaria with fresh water shrimp, many clear glass containers of multi-colored plants and a side table holding various algae cultures, which Hubbard studies. Algae are the enemies of anything kept in water. Hubbard has been fighting them ever since he first started keeping a small tank of fish in the kitchen, to Helen's dismay. "The only green in this kitchen is that which we eat!" she hurled around the corner towards the library when she first discovered the aquatic setup already growing algae. Walking amongst the aquaria I am always overwhelmed with a peaceful sensation. Nothing can grow here unless it is in complete rest. There might be a whirlwind of activity inside the glass enclosures and the crickets might make quite a noise, but the structures themselves need to be absolutely still and this contrast between the noise, the smells of fresh water and the solid tanks gives a very solidifying atmosphere. Pumps keep water flowing in and out of the aquaria and filter out any dirt particles and at the same time adding yet another layer of sensory calmness. Connected to the streaming water are copper pipes and machineries creating bubbles in some of the tanks. This is to add oxygen to the water, or so my mentor says. It always strikes me as odd that we need to add air to water, are fish not supposed to be able to do without?

One of the tanks was completely empty that day, other than containing clear water. We switch food sources from one tank to another so that we can clean and quarantine the one previously used. This way we spot if there are any creatures in the tank that should not be there and we kill any algae instead of having to clean constantly as we get food from it. Temperature was just right and the bubbling machine was already on for a while, having started it this morning. Eggs are tiny and you only need a few because they start multiplying rapidly soon after they grow a bit. I added the eggs and flipped the chart noting the exact time and water settings and left. Nature would kick in within 24 hours and the eggs would hatch into tiny creatures. This did indeed happen and the next morning there were already a couple of white dots bobbing around the surface. Again I noted the details in the log attached to the tank and went back to work. In the late afternoon as I got some plants from the attic to take to the vivarium, I checked up on the Daphnia to see how they were doing. To my astonishment the creatures had doubled in size and were now zooming across the tank in non-Daphnia fashion.

Hubbard did not believe me, saying that water lice (as we sometimes call this particular food supply) does not 'zoom' around an aquarium, they bob and twitch but do not zoom. With difficulty did the old man make it up to the attic to have a look for himself. "Whatever did you put in that tank? That is definitely not Daphnia in there", he said. Luckily I had saved the envelope and the box, which I gave him. "Dear boy I will have to educate you in the works of Linnaeus and give you more lessons in Latin. These are not Daphnia but Triops Cancriformis", Hubbard said peering through his glasses examining the label on the envelope. "They must have accidentally added a set of the wrong eggs to our shipment. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing after all, you can learn a lot from these fossils", Hubbard continued. "Fossils you said?" I asked having recently read about animals trapped in stone millions of years ago leaving an imprint of their former self. "Yes indeed Jeremy, these are living fossils, relatives of the trilobites about which I had you read a couple of chapters recently. These animals here are direct descendants of the first animals to live in our oceans and lakes. In fact they have barely changed at all and look very similar to what they did millions of years ago. People have been writing about them now for a while and are studying them as if they were actual prehistoric specimens. Even the esteemed Goethe has written about them in his: 'Bemerkungen über Phyllopoden, nebst einer Übersicht ihrer Gattungen und Arten'. Let's take out the Triops and put them in a smaller tank, then we can use this one again for the Daphnia", he said, now excited.

This is how the curious Triops were added to our ever growing population creatures already occupying various parts of the house. Every morning and every afternoon I went to see what was happening in the small tank we had put them in. Astonishingly they doubled in size for the first couple of days. They did this by what can only be called 'jumping out of their skin'. One would wriggle a bit, do a few sit-ups in the center of the tank and then literally jump out of its shell, leaving behind a ghost of its former self in the form of a thin yellow membrane that preserved the shape of the animal perfectly. Hubbard told me that these skins were extremely tough and would not dissolve or break down and so I removed them every morning. They are strange animals indeed, not quite shrimp, not quite crabs, something in between. All day they zoom around the fish tank and do not seem to understand up from down. Sometimes they swim on their backs and sometimes they simply twirl from the surface all the way down to the gravel where they rest for a while, dozens of legs turned upwards. By now there are three of them left, having eaten those who were the weakest. Apparently they do not tolerate more than about one per two liters of water, any more and an instinctive population control mechanism kicks in. There is much to tell about them and I will provide updates on their progress as they grow bigger. Already they have laid eggs, which I diligently extract and dry for later use. They may still be useful as food for some of the other animals, although I can't imagine what would eat something that is nothing but hard shell. Hubbard has expressed an interest in studying some of their peculiar features and wonders if we can learn something about their relatives the long extinct Trilobites. Even Helen has shown curiosity and finds them fascinating to watch. Perhaps it's their liveliness that keeps the eye glued to the glass. Olivia gave them one glance and immediately left the room saying that she had never seen such a disgusting animal in her life. Instead she went downstairs to see the new baby Discus fish that had just hatched and were swarming around the proud parents.

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