Skip the trip to the Galapagos Islands. Instead, plan a trip to Brooklyn to visit Dominica Fiume’s zoology lab on the second floor of IS 96 Seth Low, one of the UFT’s Community Learning Schools.

Here students will introduce you to Ashton, the blue-tongued skink who thrives on cat food, or Temperun, the bearded dragon who likes crickets with her greens, or Bentley, the 50-pound sulcata tortoise whose wooden pen grows as he does because he ingests five to eight pounds of chicory each day, along with calcium powder and vitamin D3 to compensate for not being out in the sunshine.

The 13-year-old corn snake artfully winding its way around 8th-grader Antonella’s arm is a sharp contrast to 18-month-old Zigzag, a wee, albino snake lazing under a warming lamp. That’s because, Fiume explained, “I like to bring in baby animals so the students can watch their development.”

The reptiles, amphibians, small mammals and students all live and learn to a gentle background chorus of cooing doves and chirping canaries, an environment that Fiume began creating when she came to the Bensonhurst school in 2003 and has since expanded through rescues and adoptions.

The zoology program is one of 13 electives offered to students at the middle school, which has been forced to share its building with a Success Academy Charter School. Students explore the various electives in 6th grade and then focus on one for 7th and 8th grades.

Students in Fiume’s science course experience hands-on learning as they focus on a different animal group each month. With crickets saved from being fed to the bearded dragon, for example, they conducted scientific experiments on the insects’ reaction to light versus dark and to wet versus dry.

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Erica Berger

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Erica Berger

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Erica Berger

“What students have to get used to is that when they want to study a particular trait or watch a particular activity, animals do not always cooperate,” said Fiume. “Animals do their own thing.”

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Erica Berger

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Erica Berger

She further expands student knowledge and understanding of zoology with a growing collection of animal skeletons, National Geographic and Discovery Channel videos, trips to zoos and the American Museum of Natural History, and class visits from zoology experts.

Especially memorable was the visit by educators from the Staten Island Zoo who brought Madagascar hissing cockroaches. The educators led a behavioral-studies lesson for the children on the insects’ reaction to wet and dry environments (the three-inch-long bugs emitted their signature hiss when wet).

A dedicated group of students arrives every morning at 7 a.m. to clean the cages, pens and tanks and to feed and check on the creatures’ well-being and the proper functioning of all the equipment that keeps them safe and healthy.

The lab began inadvertently when Fiume brought her pet rabbit to class in 2003 so her ESL students could better understand what she was explaining about mammals. That created an “aha” moment, and she ran with it and hasn’t stopped running since.

The lab grew until lack of funding and declining school enrollment temporarily closed it down in 2009. But after a fresh start two years later, robotics and zoology are the “big sellers” that have helped turn the school into the vibrant Community Learning School it is today, according to Fiume.

“When Success Academy came into our building, we needed to rebuild,” says IS 96 Chapter Leader Sokol Muja. “As a result, we started looking inward and trying to see what we could do differently to reach the community. Our zoology program and our robotics program are all part of what is being done to engage the kids and help them become owners of their own instruction.”

The lab animals have also become “great behavior-management tools” in Fiume’s skilled hands. She described the “amazing change that takes place when I give a stressed student a rabbit to stroke or when I give an anxious student the skink to hold. He immediately calms down because he knows the animal needs the calm.”

Over summer vacations, she takes all the creatures, except the reptiles, to her home in Pennsylvania. With the support of Principal Erin Lynch, who helps out, Fiume comes back twice a week to check up on and care for the reptiles.

Fiume knows she’s done her job. “Most teachers receive flowers as gifts from students,” she said. “I receive dead things my students have found and bring back from their trips.”