SIOUX CITY JOURNAL (Iowa) 11 April 08 Zooman brings reptiles to school (Earl Horlyk)
Sioux City: Leaping lizards!
Actually, leaping geckos, milk snakes and a particularly scary-looking blue-tongued skink were on display Thursday when Zooman (aka zoologist Brent Mielke) visited the students at Washington Elementary School.
"Who wants to be the next contestant on 'The Price Is Fright?'" Mielke asked as he held up the multicolored skink to an audience made up of Washington preschoolers and first-graders.
"Every hand in the classroom went up," he laughed after the presentation. "That's the great thing about kids. They're pretty fearless!"
That's exactly the response Mielke was aiming for when he began showing off his creepy critters more than 20 years ago.
His aim: to arrest adolescent herpetophobia while kids are still young.
"Reptiles always get a bad rap," Mielke explained. "People think they're ooey, gooey or slimy. But they're not. Reptile skin is as dry as humans'."
Showing off a white snow corn snake, the Zooman said it had a tail "that shook just like a rattlesnake."
"That's how it would ward off predators," he explained. "A white snake couldn't hide in the grass like other snakes could. So he had to mimic a rattlesnake."
Another way the snow corn snake kept enemies at bay: a detachable jaw.
"He can easily open his jaw to five times his size," Mielke said as the kids oohed and aawed. "He could easily gobble up a frog in a single bite."
"That's one big mouth!" he said to the children, who nodded their heads in agreement.
Detailing the slithery history of the milk snake, Zooman told the students that cowboys would often mistake them for the deadlier coral snake.
"Cowboys weren't smart and didn't have libraries like you guys do," Mielke explained. "They didn't realize that the milk snake's red and black meant 'Good luck, Jack!' And that the coral snake's red and black and yella could really kill a fella!"
Milk snakes got their unusual name from pioneer farm women who chased them away from barns, believing they liked milk.
"The farm women thought (the snakes) were after milk," Mielke said. "Instead, they were more interested in the cow."
The Zooman has been to 48 states and does as many as 2,500 shows a year.
"I've done shows for students in grade schools," he said, "I've done shows for college kids and everybody in between."
The reaction, Mielke said, is always the same.
"There's just something about reptiles that folks find fascinating," he said.
When he's not on the road, entertaining students, the Sleepy Eye, Minn.-based Mielke said he coaches a girls basketball team, fittingly called the Pythons.
"What can I say?" the Zooman said, smiling. "I can't seem to stay away from reptiles!"
Zooman brings reptiles to school