Exotic Teacher Pets

Several teachers at Samo have exotic pets that they keep in their room, whether it be a gift from past students or just a personal hobby.Ari Marken, a math teacher, owns a leopard gecko that was given to him last year by his students. The lizard, Ernest, was named after Ernest William Brown, one of Marken’s favorite mathematicians. “Ernest was named by the many generous students that pooled their time and money and resources to give me my pet leopard gecko,” Marken said.She usually eats live crickets and live worms and some special orange citrus cubes for hydration, and only needs to be fed once or twice every week. Ingo Gaida, the teacher of AP Biology, AP Environmental Science and Academic Decathalon, also owns a pet in his classroom. His snake, a 10-year-old ball python, has multiple identities (one for each class period), but is generally referred to as “The Snake”. Gaida received the snake as a gift from one of his students about five years ago, when that student had to move away to college. During long holidays such as summer break, Gaida takes the snake home with him. However, during shorter vacations like spring or winter break, the snake remains at school because of its ability to endure long periods of time without food. “He eats rats; a medium-sized rat every two or three weeks,” Gaida said.Students are allowed to play with it when there is a couple minutes left after lectures or class activities. Although he may be a distraction during class sometimes, he is a good companion for the students and makes the classes more interesting.Another owner of an interesting pet is Benjamin Kay, who teaches AP Environmental Science, Marine Biology and Honors Biology. He has multiple marine animals in his small aquarium including a swell shark, a rock fish and a whelk (a type of marine snail). Usually, Kay collects his own organisms with his Scientific Collections Permit, but they have also had generous donations from the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. “Over spring break [I will hopefully] collect some more organisms to stock our aquarium with little lives, so we have a window into the Santa Monica Bay,” Kay said. Although the aquarium has been in Kay’s room for a couple of years, the mini grant that they received last year has really helped it take off. Before its current growing success, the aquarium was shut down because teachers and students were unable to access the classroom over summer break, leaving no one to take care of the marine animals.“Now we have, hopefully, a set of principals and an administration team that will allow us to access the classroom over the summer so we can feed them,” Kay said. “I’d love to take them home, but carrying two thousand pounds of water… It’s also hard to carry a tank like that, and you have to drain it and transfer the animals. That would be too hard on the marine life.”During the school year though, students help feed the fish and clean the aquarium. Kas has also invited Special Education students to his classroom to enjoy the aquarium. The aquarium is also used for his class experiments, such as storing and growing plankton samples. Due to the temperature that marine lives require, the planktons can remain chilled. “I plan to continue to aquarium and keep enriching the classes with beautiful visual that the aquarium provides,” Kay said. Students are welcome to drop by and check out these amazing pets and hopefully in the near future, we will be able to see more animals in our classrooms.