DOZENS OF CHILDREN and adults crowded around tables lined with clear plastic containers on Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, all reaching their hands out, palms up, and asking if it was their turn yet.
They were all there for the chance to meet critters that creep and crawl — bugs!
Held at the Minnesota Street Project arts and community space in Dogpatch, this was the sixth year for InsectPalooza, which is the conservation nonprofit SaveNature.Org’s largest free community event of the year.
SaveNature.Org said almost 900 people attended on Sunday.
The bugs present were from the Insect Discovery Lab, a living lab in the SaveNature.Org office where they house, care for and sometimes breed insects.
“We use a lot of them as sort of our insect ambassadors,” said Adan Deeb, the nonprofit’s program and events coordinator. “We take them out to schools and birthday parties, corporate events, tablings, what have you, but we do reserve some of our more special friends for big events like this.”
A Thailand walking stick from the Insect Discovery Lab in San Francisco is gently placed into a child’s hands.
The insects’ handlers encouraged visitors to put both hands out for the larger bugs. Brave visitors had the chance to feel a giant African millipede’s legs move rhythmically along their palms or let a giant thorny phasmid that looked like a leaf cling to their fingers with tiny pokey feet. If a child or parent couldn’t work up the nerve to hold one, a handler would tell them where they could pet a surprisingly soft Thailand walking stick’s abdomen.
Some bugs felt warm from being handled by so many people.
“I think people often forget insects.” Deeb said. “When you talk about conservation, you talk about nature, people think of the big things, like dolphins and whales and jaguars and monkeys, and you forget the little tiny critters that make that circle complete.”
JoAn Smith attended the event with her two grandsons, Maverick and Thorin, who are visiting from Anchorage, Alaska.
“They’re little wilderness children so they absolutely love the bugs,” she said. “They’ve been, like, all over those bugs.”
SaveNature.Org partnered with the San Francisco Arts Education Project to provide tables of arts and crafts. Kids could color butterfly wings to tie on their backs, decorate beetles that would be turned into wearable pins and mold clay bugs they could take home.
The Insect Discovery Lab also made large batches of chocolate chip and mealworm cookies available. Adan Deeb said they spent at least ten hours baking them.
A volunteer with the nonprofit SaveNature.Org offers chocolate chip cookies containing mealworms to visiting kids.
“It really wasn’t bad,” said Diane Justen, who tried one and brought another to her six-year-old daughter. “I did not notice the worms. I was trying to not notice the worms.”
All the cookies were eaten up well before the end of the event.
The post InsectPalooza brings creepy crawlies to SF appeared first on Local News Matters.