BEETLES: It’s starting to get a bit crowded in the museum

Brought back from South Africa, Kimsey said they tend to keep the two together on display. She explains: “As we study the beetle and see what they eat and drink, it’s kind of awesome.”Also on display was the Harlequin beetle. Hailing from up in the trees of Latin America, Kimsey showed me an example of a boy. “You can tell because it has super long legs. The females’ legs are much, much shorter.”

Her favorite? The clown weevils from the Philippines. “Gorgeous things” with their metallic green and blues, it looked like a mosaic on its back.

“It’s amazing what you can do with an exoskeleton. You can make all sorts of fluffy things; you can make different colors, textures, you know, horns, not horns, smooth, shiny.”

The Bohart, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2021, was packed for the Beetle Mania lineup.

The open-house event featured Folsom Lake College professor Fran Keller, a Bohart Museum scientist, and carabid beetle expert Kipling “Kip” Will, associate professor with the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.

Some species Keller worked on occur outside the vernal pools at Jepson Prairie Preserve, where she studied beetles that lay their eggs. “Nobody knew that, or recorded that; so that was significant.”

Similarly, in Carrizo Plain, a large grassland in San Luis Obispo County, Keller found beetles eating pygmy weed and laying their eggs in the soil.

Iris Bright accompanied Keller in the 2019 Bohart Belize BioBlitz collection trip. At Beetle Mania, she discussed her dissertation, which focuses on the unusual white coloration in a minority of beetles from Namibia within the genus phenocrysts. She asks why white coloration is evolving because beetles around the world mostly are scanning for black. “White coloration is really unusual. There are some beetles, especially in a desert where they don’t want to dry out, they’ll get this kind of wax on, and you can see there’s white coloration on that. And that’s a lack of wax, but this is not wax. It’s actually like the layer of coloration is white.”

Once she has figured out how often this phenomenon has occurred and what kind of evolution mechanism has enabled it, she’ll be able to look at logical reasons like sexual selection or mimicry.

The museum has also hosted birthday outings, as in the case of Teddy Marlatte of Auburn, as reported by Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist for UCD’s Department of Entomology and Nematology. Garvey reported, “his little sister, Reagan, 1½, tagged along, too, but she favored her stuffed animal. Insects will come later!”

While the Bohart focuses mostly on insects, six-legged animals, they have critters with more legs in their collection, explained Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator at the museum. “So we do have arachnids like spiders and scorpions and ticks and mites and things like that. We’ve got millipedes and centipedes, so they’re all arthropods. They’ve all got the hardshell body, but they’re invertebrates. They don’t have a spine, but they just have more legs than our traditional six.”

Kimsey said that as the Bohart offers an equal mixture of science outreach and specimen storage, staff also field phone calls from public members with creepy concerns of the crawling sort, like, “‘I found this killer insect in my bathtub. Is it going to make me sick?’ Or, ‘I have skin parasites.’ ‘There’s a monster spider.’” Chuckling, she said they just talk them down.

About 10,000 Kissing Bugs were donated recently to The Bohart Museum of Entomology and Nematology from the late Medical Entomology and Parasitology Professor Raymond Ryckman who worked on kissing bugs at Loma Linda, a Seventh Day Adventist University.

Found in the coastal range, they’re dark brown and feed on people. “They like to bite the real thin skin around the eyes and mouth; that’s why they call them kissing bugs,” Kimsey said.

Kimsey said the museum receives donations from private collectors, mostly men, who collect insects. When they pass away, or they get too old, their families contact the museum to see if they’d be willing to take them. Most of the time, they say yes. “A gentleman in Bakersfield will give us his collection of 100,000 Beetles, butterflies, and moths. One hundred thousand.”

Before Ryckman passed away, he actually donated part of his collection and after he was gone, his family donated the rest of his books and other materials. “So we’re still digging out from there.”

Visitors are welcome to engage staff as they are working. “I think the only way you’re going to engage people and have them understand the enormous diversity of what we’re talking about is to show them physically,” Kimsey said.

Worried “all the time” about running out of space at the museum, Kimsey said the Bohart is home to more than 8 million specimens with room for maybe another million. “But at the rate things are going, we’re going to be out in the hall pretty soon. If I can be annoying as possible, though, maybe they’ll give us a new building,” she joked, that is if she can find $50 million to have it built.

The current museum spans 5,000 square feet, but Kimsey said they could easily use another 5,000 for public space.