Yesterday, we headed down to Richmond Nature Park for their first annual Bugs Galore! event. This was a fun opportunity to introduce the public, particularly children, to the wonders of insects and other arthropods. When you have a roomful of kids meeting some pretty cool bugs, magic happens!
![IMG_2650](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2650.jpg)
kids of all ages showed up, and most were wide awake…
![IMG_2658](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2658.jpg)
The leaf insects got quite a workout, and the kids loved handling them.
![IMG_2687](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2687.jpg)
Although some adults were more wary!
![IMG_2708](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2708.jpg)
Catherine brought male and female black widows, as well as some false black widows.
![IMG_2719](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2719.jpg)
The Reptile Guy, Mike Hopcraft brought some awesome tarantulas, amblypygids (tailless whip scorpions) and scorpions. Here Catherine gets up close with Gretchen.
![IMG_2723](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2723.jpg)
Most folks were happy to have a close spider encounter…
![IMG_2863](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2863.jpg)
but some less so!
When people asked Mike (the Reptile Guy) “why doesn’t the spider bite you?” he replied “why would she?”. Catherine also surprised a lot of folks by telling them that black widows are not aggressive and hardly ever bite.
![IMG_2700](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2700.jpg)
A great educational display was a female black widow, into whose cage we introduced this male. Over the course of several hours he courted and copulated.
![IMG_2858](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2858.jpg)
Which was awesome!
![IMG_2739](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2739.jpg)
What time is it? Amblypygid time!
![IMG_2773](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2773.jpg)
The Reptile Guy doing his thing!
![IMG_2776](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2776.jpg)
We got to talk to all kinds of people about science and bugs.
![IMG_2782](http://ibycter.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_2782.jpg)
Tanya introduced visitors to some of the major common insect orders
We had about 750 people come through, most of whom stayed for quite a while.
Many thanks to Emily Toda at the Richmond Nature Park and all the great volunteers for making this event so awesome!
With so many cool insect/kid encounters going on, I had better just truncate this post with a slideshow. If you would like to see some of these in larger size, try my flickr page.
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