Jeepers--a World Full of Creepers

Come into their parlor, said the spider and the fly. And 5,000 people did.

It was no place for those who reach for the Roach Motel. But Santa Monica College student Marci Lane, who makes no secret of her Miss Muffet complex (i.e. arachnophobia) had come to the Insect Fair at the Arboretum of L.A. County precisely for a little exposure therapy.

She explained: “My girlfriend got over it by holding a tarantula at a pet store. She wound up buying it.” Right now, though, Lane was feeling a little lightheaded. “All those crawly things just really get to me.”

Why, even Arthur Evans, director of the Ralph M. Parsons Insect Zoo, the fair sponsor, admitted that he gets a little tingle on the back of his neck when surprised by a spider.

“Next to small spaces, dark spaces and heights,” he observed, arachnophobia ranks high among human phobias.

Amanda Scalise, 11, of South Gate obviously isn’t afflicted. She’d just talked her dad, Robert, into buying her a tarantula. “Better that than a snake, I guess,” he said. “But your mom’s going to have a fit.”

Matthew Dell, a Sierra Madre artist, was taking home praying mantis egg cases. “I’m really thrilled,” he said, at the prospect of hundreds of little praying mantises--some destined for organic garden duty.

“They have no fear,” Dell said. “They’ll attack a mirror until they almost kill themselves.” Of course, they do have their quirks. Like the female tarantula--she’s a femme fatale . “After sex, she finishes him off,” he explained. “What a way to go, huh?”

There were Medflies buzzing about in a plastic cube. “Live, sterile Medflies,” Evans noted, adding: “It’s a miserable job, tying all their tiny little tubes, but somebody has to do it.”

Chris Blum, an Orange County Department of Education naturalist, was extolling the virtues of Millie the millipede as the myriapod made her way across his hand on 220 legs.

Low maintenance, said Blum of millipedes, which resemble a black worm on steroids: “All you do is feed them lettuce and squirt them with water now and then.” Millie may be Milton. “We don’t know how to sex them or age them, but it takes quite a while to grow so many legs.”

Children pressed their noses against the glass of a honeybee colony, trying to spot the queen--she’s the one with a white dot on her thorax--among 2,500 drones and workers. Just then, the queen took 10 seconds out to lay another egg, one of about 50 that day.

To beekeeper Bruce Steele of Sierra Madre, the fair is about education. Too often, he said, people’s attitude toward bugs is, “If it doesn’t look like you, step on it.”

Marty and Jayne Highton of San Diego brought tables inlaid with blue butterflies under glass. Poor butterflies? Not really, said Jayne Highton--they were raised on a butterfly farm in a Thai rain forest and had lived out their two-week life cycle. Butterfly farming, she explained, enables Thais to earn a living without chopping down the forest.

Tarantula sales were brisk. Oscar Gonzalez of West Covina explained his impulse buy: “I just gave my friend my iguana.”

At Ron Cauble’s table, $15 bought a rose hair tarantula or an emperor scorpion. The latter, a stingless variety that looks like a tiny black lobster, was being touted as the perfect pet: “They don’t bark. They don’t mess on the floor. And if you don’t pet them, they don’t care.”

To a man gingerly handling one, Cauble deadpanned, “They pinch one out of every five people.”

Could Cauble describe a typical tarantula or scorpion owner? “They’re usually sort of misanthropes. Perhaps it’s a little slap in the face of society.”

Timo Laine, a Mira Loma real estate agent and amateur bug collector, had brought some of the 20,000 specimens he has speared without guilt: “A single parrot will eat more insects in his lifetime than every entomologist in this room together will destroy.” He worries more that rain forests will be destroyed before we learn what’s there.

Nearby, museum volunteer Linda Lee Ziskin was stroking a two-inch Madagascan hissing cockroach, a creature for which she has an inexplicable affection--”Maybe this was my great-grandfather. . . .”

At BioQuip Products’ table, Ken Fall of Gardena was trading in the tools of the trade: tweezers, magnifying cubes, pinning blocks, tiny insect gas chambers.

He encourages “bug junkies”--so long as they’re studying bugs, not decorating with them. Insects, he mentioned, “kill millions of people worldwide and eat about a third of what we grow.”

To learn about insects, the museum’s Evans agreed, “you have to get up close and personal.” Besides, “Human beings are notoriously poor insect predators.”

But, being environmentally aware, he does hope to minimize sales at future fairs of bug paperweights, bug bolo ties, bug jewelry.

Meanwhile, he’s off to Ohio and Mississippi on a bugman’s holiday: collecting scarab beetles.

Quotable: Theologian Toinette Eugene spoke at Immaculate Heart College on the dynamics of race, gender and sexual abuse. Eugene, an African American who is associate professor of Christian social ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., said:

“The issue here is, how shall we love? I’m interested in a love that just says no. . . . Violence is violence is violence. It crosses class, it crosses cultures, it crosses race.”

But, among African Americans, she said, the issue is exacerbated by an oppressive and dysfunctional social structure and a church that is “very silent” about sexual violence.

“Almost daily a black man kills a woman who has left him.”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.