Playing with Tarantula

"Playing with Tarantula"

Eighth graders use Super Glue, 'surgery' to save tarantula after brutal fall

January 31, 2000
Web posted at: 2:04 p.m. EST (1904 GMT)

SPRINGFIELD, Missouri (AP) -- Felicia Daniels wants
to be a veterinarian when she grows up. She's off to a good start.

When the pet tarantula in Felicia's eighth-grade
classroom took a tumble and cracked its abdomen,
the students reassembled its innards, closed it up with
Super Glue and apparently saved the creature's life.

"It looked kind of gross," said Felicia, who had the task
of applying the glue. "At first I thought it was going to
make me sick. But then it looked kind of cool."

The spider, named Sir Isaac Newton, lives in an aquarium
in Carolyn Mulkey's science classroom at Study Middle School.

Sir Isaac's brush with death occurred Thursday as
Mulkey was trying to hand the spider to student
Charity Thomas. The spider tried to make a break
for it but instead fell about 4 feet to the floor.

"I heard it," Mulkey said. "He thunked when he hit pretty hard."

Hitting the floor cut the tarantula's abdomen open.
Student Chris Davis had a brainstorm: surgery and Super Glue.

He and the guilt-stricken Charity, by then ready "to do
anything to save his life," donned plastic gloves and
used a Popsicle stick to push the spider's vital organs
back in place before Felicia applied the glue.

Still, there was no real hope that Sir Isaac Newton
would recover. The defenseless spider was rather
lethargic in post-op.

"I assumed I would come in this morning and he
would be dead," Mulkey said Friday. Instead, she
found a sluggish but hungry spider munching on
a mealworm.

And as famed commentator Nathaniel Harari told
The DAILY DOSE! via email, "What I want to know
is why kids are handling tarantula spiders in the eighth grade...?"

Source: The Associated Press

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"How To Correctly Date Dinosaur Bones"

Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History
are marveling at the dinosaur bones. One of them
asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the
dinosaur bones are?"

The guard replies, "They are three million, four
years, and six months old."

"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist.
"How do you know their age so precisely?"

The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones
were three million years old when I started working
here, and that was four and a half years ago."
Received on Wed Nov 28 07:50:45 2007