THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 16, 1994 TAG: 9411150130
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 05 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LINDA McNATT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WINDSOR LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
Blow toads can't hold their breath for very long.
Several fourth graders and at least one teacher learned that important fact, when a toad, swelled to the size of a small basketball, exhaled and gave them an early-morning drenching.
``This is the way the toads protect themselves,'' Rick Contreras of the Virginia Marine Science Museum said as the students giggled and cheered at the performance. ``The blow toad, or puffer, has buck teeth to pick barnacles off rocks.''
The toad was just one player in the line of aquatic talent when the marine museum brought the Chesapeake Bay to Windsor Elementary School last week. The visit from the museum was part of the fourth graders' study of the bay, teacher Sharon Harrell said.
Since some field trips in the schools have been limited this year, the elementary school in Windsor took advantage of the traveling exhibit, she said. The museum on wheels, with ancient fossils as well as living, breathing, swimming creatures, came to the school.
Contreras told the students that a cousin of the blow toad, native to Japan, is poisonous, but the Japanese people still like to eat them and consider the fish a delicacy. Japanese chefs have to study for months before being allowed to cook it. Even then, several people in Japan die each year from having eaten it.
From the shores to the lower depths, Contreras and his co-worker, Andrew Wilson, explored the mysteries of the bay for the students, using the traveling marine world creatures as examples.
Egg strings laid by conchs, large sea snails whose homes are popular seashells that can be found on Eastern Shore beaches, are frequently referred to as ``mermaid's necklaces,'' Contreras said, holding the dried string of eggs around his own neck.
And skate egg pockets, he said, holding up a small, black, leathery-looking example, are called ``mermaid's pocketbooks.''
Seahorses are one of the few creatures where the male of the species bears the young.
``And yes, we do indeed have seahorses in the Chesapeake Bay,'' he said, passing in front of his audience with one tiny specimen in a plastic bucket with eel grass. ``They use their tails to wrap around the eel grass so they can stay put. They are different from other animals because daddy has the babies. He has a pouch on his belly, and the female lays her eggs in the pouch so he can incubate them.''
The assembly in the gymnasium could easily have been called ``Meet the Crabs.'' Contreras had brought with him from the museum in Virginia Beach every imaginable variety of crabs found in and around the bay.
Spider crabs, he said, have 10 legs, not eight, like real spiders. They use their claws to put seashells and rocks on their backs to camouflage themselves, and they are cousins to king crabs.
And what sea creature hasn't changed in 315 million years and really is related to spiders as well as to scorpions? Why, it's the common old horseshoe crab, found in and all around the Chesapeake Bay.
``These are very gentle creatures,'' Contreras said, holding a large female in the air for the students to see. ``And they are still maintaining their numbers very well. There are only four populations of horseshoe crabs in the world. Three of them are in Europe, one on the Atlantic seacoast.''
After the ``meet the bay creatures'' assembly, the students participated in fish workshops conducted by Wilson and toured the traveling exhibit set up on a truck outside sporting the window placard ``Shark on Board.''
Sure enough, the placard was touting a young nurse shark, or sand shark, swimming in a small aquarium inside the body of the truck, where other Chesapeake Bay exhibits also were displayed.
The Virginia Marine Science Museum's traveling exhibit visits between 15 and 20 schools each month, Contreras said. And all of the animals, he said, do quite well. ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Rick Contreras of the Virginia Marine Science Museum talks about
specimens.
by CNB