By Luisa Loi
La Conner Community News
Friday, some of nature’s best camouflage artists paid a visit to the La Conner Swinomish Library for a fun — and somewhat chilling — lesson on bugs.
Don Ehlen, a Seattle-based entomologist who runs an educational insect program known as Insect Safari, brought a collection of hundreds of preserved arthropods and introduced some of his pet bugs to a mesmerized group of children and grown-ups.
Arthropods are a large group of invertebrate animals that include insects, spiders, crabs, shrimp, millipedes, and centipedes. Over the years, Ehlen has collected 2,100 specimens from all over the world, in many cases by catching them in the wild and raising them in colonies, or, if he can’t find them himself, by purchasing them.
Ehlen started off with a Biology 101 crash course, explaining how living creatures are classified and the differences between the different arthropods. He then showed off his insect storage drawers displaying carefully pinned butterflies, moths, bees, ants, wasps, tics, stickbugs, waterbugs, grasshoppers, cicadas, flies, centipedes, crabs, spiders and more bugs of different shapes, sizes and colors. The bugs all have a different backstory, like a pair of scorpions he caught in Indonesia, or the clearwing butterflies he spent 30 years looking for before finally finding a pair online.
The stars of the show were Ehlen’s unconventional pets — live bugs from different parts of the world.
Ehlen demonstrated how scorpions become fluorescent under a UV light, their dark exoskeleton turning cyan. He then gently pinched the tail of an Asian stickbug, which, as a defense mechanism to scare away predators, revealed two tiny red wings.
Another stickbug, the Diesbachia tamyris, flaunted black and pink wings that it uses to fly short distances to escape danger.
Contrary to what its name would suggest, the thorny devil walking stick politely showed off its twig-like figure, perfect for camouflaging on the ground.
The Madagascar hissing cockroach, which he called “the best bug pet,” warded Ehlen off with its namesake sound and made the children squeal when it scuttled their way.
It was a cool day to be a bug, no doubt.
Luisa Loi is a general assignment reporter for La Conner Community News.
