Kate came to the school to help us understand more about some really interesting animals.
First she showed us her Giant African Land Snail, who is called Speedy! She told us that there are 1600 types of snail, but many of them are now classed as endangered species.
Next up was Hannah, a fast hissing cockroach from Madagascar. She eats jungle rubbish, fruit and dead animals. Hannah has an exo-skeleton instead of bones inside her body.
Susannah is a Golden Knee Tarantula was from the deserts of Peru, and she can send out itchy hairs that frighten off predators that might want to eat her.
She makes trip-wire webs to catch her prey of grasshoppers, then kills them with a special poison that turns the grasshoppers’ insides to soup that she can drink to get her nourishment!
And on top of all that, the female tarantulas eat the males and then live alone in burrows in the ground.
The Giant African Millipede is called ‘Chongola’ in Africa, and it eats mostly leaves and dead animals.
All the creatures we saw were invertebrates except for the Corn Snake from America. It eats feeds once a week on mice and small rats that it squeezes and then swallows whole. The Corn Snake uses its forked tongue to smell its prey.
The children had a great time holding and looking at all these exotic creatures, and they were able to ask lots of questions about them. It was a really informative – as well as fun - day.
