Insects are invading the museum!

It’s yet another Friday night at the museum – rather, it’s another Night at the Museum, this one bug themed.  Children gather in the front of Iowa Hall, excited to spend an evening talking about the creepy, crawling critters that skitter across kitchen floors and conquer their backyards.  Previous programs have focused on things like penguins and the Galapagos Islands – fascinating in their own way, but not something you’ll see at home.  By contrast, bugs are everywhere, and the children’s excitement is palpable.

Although we have several bug activities planned – creating a “bug jar,” for example – tonight’s program features a presentation from the Iowa State University’s Insect Zoo.  After pizza and punch, the children head to the Biosphere Discovery Hub, where two entomologists have filled an entire table with bug jars and butterfly cases. 

They first bring out mealworms – which flip if you tap their heads accordingly – but the real action starts with the beetles.  Small, black, and mobile, the beetles bounce around the tables as the children try to identify the three parts to an insect: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen.  Some of the beetles crawl along outstretched fingers, jumping from hand to hand and occasionally trying to make a dive to the ground.

After the beetles come hissing cockroaches; these cockroaches are far bigger than the ones you might see at home, about the length of a pinky finger, and of course, they hiss.  Cockroaches, the children learn, are decomposers – they eat things that are rotting, giving them a more important role in the ecosystem than at first glance.  The cockroaches zoom around the tables.  The children try tapping their shells so they can move faster – sometimes they don’t budge, other times they nearly fall off the table.

We often see cockroaches—or other bugs—as unruly pests, and nothing more: the moment we see them scurrying around the kitchen, we reach for the kitchen and squelch it.  The Insect Zoo, by contrast, gives the children a chance to see them up close, to really investigate its antennae, or the pattern of its shell.  Every animal, every creature, is intriguing and intricate, but these little things get overlooked in everyday life, in the rush of getting the bug out of the kitchen.  Tonight, however, there’s no squelching.

When the entomologists pass out 
millipedes, the children look to see how the thin, orange legs—all 300 or 400 of them—propel the millipede around an outstretched finger, and how the millipede attaches itself, like Velcro, to whatever surface.  Later on, the children learn about a ‘walking stick,’ another decomposing insect.  One of the presenters holds a walking stick in her outstretched hand, and it falls from her hand at least five times – but it keeps on walking anyways.  The children look at a praying mantis in a glass jar, and come up to the front table to look at butterflies in cases.

But it’s the tarantula that takes the cake.  Cockroaches and beetles are everywhere, but it’s not every day you can touch a tarantula.  

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian