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

Nature's Small Wonders Pack a Vibrant Punch!

By Catherine Babikian

Take a look around Mammal or Hageboeck Hall of Birds and you’ll find a cornucopia of fascinating animals, from little sparrows and finches to impressive walruses and bison.  Although these halls are home to plenty of animals, even more reside in museum storage.  The Museum of Natural History has far more animals in its possession than it has room for display – the attic of Macbride Hall is teeming with beautiful animals from all over the world.

Many of these animals were collected by William Temple Hornaday and given to the museum after his death.  A zoologist and graduate of Iowa State University, Hornaday traveled far and wide to collect animals – the deserts and beaches of Australia and the jungles of New Zealand and Malaysia among them.  His birds are splashed with bright blues, deep crimson reds, and hints of green and purple, a real change from the grays and whites of Iowa birds.  Hornaday might not have thought of it this way, but he was collecting colors and patterns as much as he was collecting birds.

 

In 1886, at the height of westward expansion, Hornaday began to collect buffalo from Montana: he expected that buffalo would be extinct by 1900, and wanted to collect specimens for future generations.  The impending extinction of the buffalo pained him, and he became an ardent conservationist.  He was friends with Teddy Roosevelt – Roosevelt once gave Hornaday a jaguar skull he’d shot, which the museum has in its collections – and together they formed the American Bison Society. 

For Hornaday, museums weren’t just places to deposit old things; they were places for the future to learn about the past, even if the past was long gone.  Although buffalo are not extinct today, Hornaday collected them so that we would still know our past – the Museum of Natural History does the same thing. Although not every animal in the museum’s collections is on display, it still reminds us of another place, or another time. 

My favorite birds are a set of hummingbirds collected by Hornaday – we don’t know where they’re from, but they sure are beautiful! Sometimes you don’t have to be a walrus or a bison – or even a giant sloth named Rusty – to be breathtaking.  Sometimes the smallest things are worth the most notice.  Hornaday surely knew it.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian