New friend!

Our tarantula has been popular with all the kids at SET, but she's not enjoying herself. Every since we brought her back, she's spent all her time curled up in the far corner of her cage. She's had a long life as a school pet and it's time for her to retire.

In Rosie's place? This beauty.



Our neighbors found her and brought her over. Despite what everyone thought, she's not a South American spider that snuck into the country on some bananas. She appears to be a Dolomedes tenebrosus, a fishing spider native to the northeast. As the name suggests, these spiders mostly hunt water bugs and even small fish, although they're capable of hunting on land as well.

For right now, we'll be keeping her in a plain, water-free cage and providing her with crickets and mistings. If she seems to like the school life, we'll give her a fancier home and if not, she'll return to the forest.

Chestnut seedling update!

They're growing fast!

Well, two of them are. Something's wrong with the third, and it keeps sending up new shoots rather than growing what it has. Hopefully it'll recover!

We'll be taking them home for a little bit because they're not getting enough sunlight here. Even sprouted chestnuts are at risk of being dug up by squirrels and eaten, so they have to be kept indoors for now. We'll plant them outside when they're a little bigger, during our summer program.

The chestnuts are sprouting!

Last year, I talked about the American chestnut, enormous trees that were once the cornerstone of the eastern forests until it was wiped out by a fungal blight, and how after a hundred years of attempts to bring them back, researchers finally managed to genetically engineer a tree that was immune. We naturally backed the fundraiser, and were sent three wild-type chestnut seeds to plant.

Each of the science classes planted one of the nuts, and they've all sent up shoots!

These sprouts, beautiful as they are, are doomed.

They're not the genetically engineered nuts and have no immunity to the deadly blight. But with luck, they'll last several years before dying, long enough to crossbreed with the new breed of chestnut and preserve their genes. And we'll learn a lot about growing chestnuts from them, so we'll be ready to care for the immune chestnut seeds when they're ready.