Peter Heule gently lowers a Mexican redknee tarantula into its new glass habitat at the Royal Alberta Museum.
“Ready to go into your new apartment?” he asks, as he places her on her new wood-chip floor.
“Don’t forget your packed lunch!” he adds, dropping a few live crickets in after her.
Heule is the live animals supervisor at the museum. This week, he’s been busy ferrying thousands of praying mantises, hissing cockroaches and other creepy-crawlies cross-town to the Royal Alberta’s new downtown location from its old one in Glenora.
It’s a move that’s been almost 10 years in the making, Heule says.
“It’s really exciting.”
The Royal Alberta Museum is set to open sometime this fall at its new downtown location, with final graphics and light work now underway, says executive director Chris Robinson. The new Bug Room is meant to teach Albertans about the wonder of arthropods (which include insects, spiders and crustaceans) so they better appreciate them.
“Invertebrates are not pests,” Robinson says.
“They perform incredible functions for us.”
Moving the museum’s 200-some bug species has taken months of planning, Heule says. Some can travel in ventilated jars, but others require big, heavy glass habitats secured with locks and tape. Some bite or sting, and many are poisonous. Others, such as the coral reef species, are so fragile they have to be moved one tank at a time. Heule says this week’s warm weather has been a plus, as it minimizes the temperature stress on the bugs.
Once secure, staffers load the bugs into big, blue, wheeled bins and pad them with Styrofoam and bubble wrap. The bins go on a large white truck, drive for five minutes, and then arrive at their new homes.
Bigger and buggier
The new Bug Room is about twice the size of the old one and features video terminals and individual climate-controlled habitats, Robinson says. Next door, guests can watch staffers breed, feed and raise bugs – all stuff they couldn’t see before without access to the back rooms – through a window into an area called The Hatchery.Heule says another plus of the new room is that it has backup power for its habitats, meaning that staffers won’t have to run in to start aerators and pour ice into tanks every time there’s a blackout.
“I’ll sleep better knowing that.”
The new Bug Room itself resembles a wasp’s nest, with a nest-like structure made of wavy wood beams in the centre and hexagonal acoustic panels on the outer walls. That nest area will contain two social insects native to Alberta that wouldn’t fit in the old Bug Room, Heule says: carpenter ants and northern paper wasps.
“Wasps are probably the only thing that’s less popular than mosquitoes,” he says, but these sugar-stealing terrors are actually vital predators of pests such as caterpillars. They’re super aggressive at this time of year because they’re all out of caterpillars and are desperate for any source of meat with which to feed their young – even cat food.
The wasps will live in a large glass tank inside the hive area, Heule says. Since they’ll make nests out of whatever they can find, Heule says he plans to have them build a rainbow-coloured nest for Pride Week by providing them with the right coloured papers.
Heule says he and his staffers will be busy in the next few days landscaping the new bug habitats and getting their residents settled in.
“I’m super excited to show this stuff off.”
Expect an opening date for the museum to be announced later this fall, Robinson said.
