Snake Dinner time!

As promised, here's a video of David eating his first mouse dinner in three weeks.

Curly, the Curly Haired Honduran Tarantula

One of our other exotic pets is a curly-haired Honduran tarantula.  She's just a few months old, we think. 

Her weekly diet consists of a few small to medium crickets.  She loves to explore her cage, and on occasion, she'll let one of us hold her.

She's pretty small, so the shots we have are rather close.
Here she is in my hand on Thursday, 17 December.  She was there for over an hour.  Must like the warmth.

Below is one of my 7th graders.  Haley isn't bothered by the creatures, and loves to hold the spider and the snake.  Taken on Monday, 13 December.

The Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches

There's nothing like creepy, crawly roaches to cause people's skin to crawl. 
Then you get roaches this size that hiss at you and it really compounds the icky factor.

These guys are pretty cool.



(stock photo)

David, the King Snake

I'll use this portion of the blog to keep all the herpatologists in the audience up to date.

David the King Snake is a two year old male albino.  He is very well-tempered, and shed on 12 December 2010.  He's currently in hiding.

Here are some picture of him from the 1st week of December.

Here he is on my desk.  He explores quite frequently.

And more exploration.

He likes to hide in these rocks and peek out.  He's about 20 to 22 inches in length.

He eats frozen pinkies about once per week.  He'll be hungry this week.  Maybe I'll get some video to post here for you.

Here's a video from 15 December.  He's rather active today as he's hungry.

The Tank & Setup

I'll be using this page to monitor the status of our tank and the setup thereof.  There will be another area where we monitor the tank itself - water temperature, salinity, etc. 

So, a bit of information.  There is a local business - SeaScape Studio - who CCLS is partnering with.  This partnership will allow the CCLS students to see and hear about marine animals from specialists at SeaScape studios. 

To start our partnership, we're looking to setup a 29 gallon BioCube LED Saltwater tank.  Here's a picture of one. 


The stand will be different, but this tank is completely self-contained.  If you've seen older reef tanks, you'll notice that there was quite a bit of filtration equipment needed.  The newer tanks have that built into the back. 

This tank is special because the LED lighting emits a broader spectrum of light that allows for more marine invertebrates to survive in our tank. 

We'll be using the tank to grow animals from eggs and will be part of a captive breeding program for marine animals - helping to eliminate the capture of wild marine animals for pleasure.  Captive-bred animals are better specimens for tanks due to their calmer nature and understood pedigree.

It takes years to get a reef tank to be in equilibrium, but once there, we'll have our own ocean at CCLS.  A complete marine ecosystem.  That's just awesome.

I'll keep you informed as to how we're doing, and we'll have pictures as things develop here.

If you'd like to help defray the cost of said tank, please feel free to contact Mr. Cooksey in the school office.