Going Bughouse : Insect Zoo to Open at County Natural History Museum

You know what really bugs Arthur Evans?

It’s when his friends are accused of vandalism at Los Angeles County’s Museum of Natural History.

Evans is head of the museum’s new Insect Zoo. And his friends are the 3,500 cockroaches, crickets and other crawly critters that he has spent 2 1/2 years gathering for the $465,000 exhibit.

The new zoo opens Saturday. But Evans has already learned that he must keep swatting at misconceptions that buzz like flies around his unusual collection.

He stands guard against exterminators who go on monthly cockroach patrol through the rambling, 80-year-old Exposition Park museum building.

He fends off complaints that his other insects are trying to eat exhibits such as Pu, the museum’s prized, 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy.

Most recently, one of the museum’s stuffed-bird curators decided that crickets were doing more chomping than chirping around the museum’s mounted pheasants, eagles and bluebirds. He angrily squashed one, taped it to a card and left it on Evans’ desk.

His crickets were framed, Evans contends. His beetles, sterile Medflies, tarantulas and black widow spiders stay in their 25 live display enclosures and in their special back-room breeding tanks.

“I’ve written memos and talked personally with all the museum officers. But I still have a ways to go,” Evans explained Thursday as he put the finishing touches on the Insect Zoo’s dozens of hands-on displays and educational exhibits.

“A lot of people here don’t have a clue as to what we’re about. There are still some divisions afraid that we’re bringing in insects that will eat their dried specimens, skins and fibers. But people throw their sandwiches in wastebaskets overnight and then blame us when they see cockroaches.”

Even the lowly cockroach deserves respect, however, say those who will work with them.

“The Madagascar hissing cockroach is my favorite,” said zoo volunteer Vince Maniaci as a 2 3/4-inch hisser danced the cucaracha across his face. “Cockroaches are nature’s little recyclers.”

Maniaci, of Sherman Oaks, knows plenty about insects. He owns a pest control company and when he isn’t tenderly caring for bugs at the zoo, he’s killing them at work. His most memorable extermination assignment: hundreds of two-inch American cockroaches living in a Santa Monica hospital’s sewer pipe.

“Insect technician” Kathy Burkholder said special precautions will be taken when extermination work is needed for fast-breeding residents of the Insect Zoo.

“We will do population control occasionally,” said Burkholder, of Redondo Beach. “I’ll put them in a sealed bucket and take them outside and pour in ethyl acetate.” Bug spray will be banned.

Exhibits at the Insect Zoo, which is sponsored by the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and is next to to a redesigned animal “discovery center,” include high-tech television equipment that zooms in for close-ups of carpenter ants burrowing through wood. Nearby, a low-tech display shows regular ants burrowing through sand in a huge “Uncle Milton Ant Farm.”

The zoo earned rave reviews from fourth-graders at Vermont Avenue Elementary School who received a sneak preview Thursday. The kids said there’s often little time to study insects at home.

“We stomp on cockroaches as soon as we see them,” explained 10-year-old Henry Narvaez.