National Pack Rat Day is celebrated on May 17th of each year. Pack Rat is a name given to an individual who collects and stores everything they have every acquired. The purpose of National Pack Rat Day is to bring awareness to this behavior and to encourage a little spring cleaning.

National Sea Monkey Day is celebrated on May 16th of each year. Sea-Monkeys is a brand name for brine shrimp – a group of crustaceans that undergo cryptobiosis – often sold in hatching kits as novelty aquarium pets. Invented in 1957 by Harold von Braunhut, the product was heavily marketed, especially in comic books, and remains a presence in popular culture.

Harold von Braunhut invented the product based on brine shrimp in 1957. Ant farms had been popularised the year before by Milton Levine. Initially called “Instant Life”, von Braunhut changed the name to “Sea-Monkeys” in 1962. This was based on the supposed resemblance of the animals’ tails to those of monkeys, and their salt-water habitat. The product was intensively marketed in comic books using illustrations of humanoid animals drawn by the comic-book illustrator Joe Orlando, which bear no resemblance to the crustaceans. Von Braunhut is quoted as stating: “I think I bought something like 3.2 million pages of comic book advertising a year. It worked beautifully.” Many purchasers were disappointed by the dissimilarity, and by the short lifespan of the animals.

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