From fear to fascination
Science Museum Oklahoma opens new interactive insect exhibit ‘Backyard Bugs’
Science Museum Oklahoma opens new interactive insect exhibit ‘Backyard
Bugs.’
Moving slowly from side to side, the girl stared down the praying mantis, an easier prospect than usual since this particular praying mantis happens to be 9-feet tall.
The petite blonde waved her arms as ominously as she could, laughing with delight when the towering insect suddenly splayed his spiny front legs in threatening fashion.
The oversized animatronic mantis —which reacts not just to people but to its animatronic neighbor, a giant Monarch butterfly —is the centerpiece of the new exhibition “Backyard Bugs: An Oklahoma Insect Adventure,” which recently opened at Science Museum Oklahoma. The exhibit is the latest developed by the Oklahoma Museum Network, a statewide collaboration, funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, of five partner museums working together to provide hands-on learning opportunities.
“The idea is to show insects —especially Oklahoma insects —in a less-than-frightening light. They’re very interesting. We’ve supersized them so you can see all the details and things that you would normally miss with your naked eye,” said Oklahoma Museum Network Director Eileen Castle.
“Most kids are either wanting to stomp on something or run away from it —and adults are, too —but there’s a draw to coming and getting that kind of behavioral back and forth,” she added, watching a man take a turn at engaging the giant mantis.
“Once it’s a personal experience, you care ... a little more. And you’re a little less likely to go around stomping everything.”
Insectile importance
A pair of preschoolers giggled happily as they donned bee and butterfly costumes, cradled plastic bee larvae and crawled up into a giant model of a beehive. Castle said she sewed the costumes herself so that even babies and toddlers could learn to relate to bugs they might encounter in their backyards.
“Pretend play ... is always something I’ve been passionate about, and costumes just lend themselves to pretend play. So we added a climber that they get in and babies they could take care of, flowers that they could pollinate. That allows them to experience insects on a level that’s not frightening to them and at their own rate. So I really love that,” she said.
“Insects are 90 percent of the species on the planet, and they outnumber all the other species combined. So, they are a major player in the world. Insects are responsible for the bulk of our food sources. They’re the big pollinators that make sure that we have the fruits and the vegetables that we need. They feed all the other animals that we often feed off of, so we’re really very involved with insects. Of course, we have insects that spread disease, and it’s always nice to know which ones those are and how to avoid them.”
“Backyard Bugs” is debuting at a time when declining honeybee populations are alarming scientists and conservationists, leading to the launch of save-the-bees movements.
“We wanted to introduce it in a way that wasn’t preachy and just show that they’re a very fascinating, very complex society. You don’t really think of that when you think of insects, as a complex society; we think of people that way, but not anything else,” Castle said.
“We wanted people to take an interest in bees. We figured if you get interested in them and you learn something about their life cycle, then they mean something to you. So when you say, ‘We really need to work on saving the bees. The bees have an importance in our society,’ there’s a connection. This is a family life, we have a family life; they each have jobs, we each have jobs. If we can get that connection, we can make it meaningful. You want to save something that means something to you.”
The exhibit will be on view through August at Science Museum Oklahoma before workers pack it up and send it to the Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton, where it will be displayed for six months. “The Oklahoma Insect Adventure” will make the rounds to the other network partners — Jasmine Moran Children’s Museum in Seminole, Leonardo’s Discovery Warehouse in Enid and Tulsa Children’s Museum — over the next two and a half years.
“The world doesn’t function without the insects that are in your backyard doing their thing. It’s neat to understand their jobs and what they do day in and day out to kind of make the world turn,” said Lindsay Thomas, communications director for Science Museum Oklahoma.
“It’s an outstanding exhibit, every element of it. It’s so hands-on. Everywhere you turn, there’s something new to learn. It’s not just for kids. I’ve learned quite a bit about the insects that are in my backyard.”
Hands-on experiences
Huddled over what resembles a fancy video game, a mother and her teenage son worked to decipher the lightning bug language of love, which seems vaguely similar to Morse code.
“Fireflies have a flash code. That’s their language. Each species has a very unique code, so it’s a chance for them to see if they can break that language barrier and actually communicate. They can do the same thing that they’re doing in the exhibit in their backyard with a flashlight in the summertime, so it’s just a nice way of connecting their backyard to the exhibit,” Castle said.
“We wanted to have something for adults, and it is tricky. It’s kind of is almost like a Simon game. The flash patterns are really a combination of on-off, but in a very, very specific timing . ... So, females talk to males, males talk to females, and they only communicate with their own species.”
The exhibit also includes an animatronic butterfly that appears to really drink nectar, a mosquito that seems to suck blood with the press of a button, and a jukebox that counts down the variety of crickets, cicadas and katydids whose distinctive noises combine to make the familiar droning music of an Oklahoma summer.
A collection of more than a dozen terrariums lets visitors get up close with real-life critters and challenges them to distinguish among insects, arthropods and arachnids.
“There’s a fascination and a little bit of a skittishness about going anywhere near this. There’s glass between them, but I watched a grown man look at the black widow and jump back like it was going to find its way out and over,” Castle said. “But he’s looking at it, so I think that’s always a positive thing.”
The Build-A-Bug station gives visitors a chance to mix and match oversized reproductions of different Oklahoma insects’ body parts — the intimidating head of a stag beetle, the dangerous thorax of an oil beetle and the cautionary-colored abdomen of a yellow jacket, for instance — and see what kind of strange new Sooner State creepy-crawly they can conjure.
“A lot of bugs are scary to people, so it’s ‘If these are scary, then what can you come up with that’s even more?’ So it does take the fear out of it as well,” Castle said. “And it’s a lot of fun.”