$40,000 insect, lizard theft was an inside job, Philadelphia police say
The desert hairy scorpions and domino cockroaches had vanished. The shelves at the Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion were empty, and there was little movement in the glass cases. Electric-blue staff uniforms hung from knives that had been stabbed into a wall.
Thieves had stolen more than $40,000 worth of insects and lizards, and police suspected an inside job.
Security cameras around the pavilion recorded several people creeping out of the museum last week with plastic containers holding giant African mantises, bumblebee millipedes, warty glowspot roaches, tarantulas, dwarf and tiger hissers, and leopard geckos.
John Cambridge, the chief executive of the insectarium, said he believed that “someone recognized an opportunity to remove some creatures” and did it.
An estimated 7,000 animals, or about 80-90 percent of the population of the insectarium, were stolen on Aug. 22 and possibly other days, Cambridge said. Three current or former employees of the insectarium are the suspects, the Philadelphia Police Department said in a statement. Officer Tanya Little, a department spokeswoman, said there had been no arrests yet.
The police have contacted the suspects and are searching their homes in hopes of finding surviving insects. It is difficult to know which creatures were stolen because the thieves also stole the logs used by the pavilion to keep track of the insects.
“They are extremely easy to hide,” Cambridge said in an interview Thursday. “We want to make sure that these creatures are treated with respect.”
“I really don’t think the perpetrators realize the severity of what they were doing,” he added. “We believe these were taken for the purpose of resale.”
The police have returned a handful of insects and a Mexican fireleg tarantula to the insectarium. But a six-eyed sand spider, one of the most venomous of its kind in the world, is still missing.
“We are happy that we still have the ones that we do,” Cambridge said. “We continue to use those ones for educational purposes.”
The insectarium opened its doors to the public in February 2017. Because of the theft, it has closed the second and third floors of the pavilion until November. The organization has started a GoFundMe campaign to help with renovations and to try to replace some of the missing insects.