Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Bug enthusiasts will be pleased to know that World of the Insect isn’t just one of the best bug houses in the country, but also the first built in the U.S. Some of the nation’s most passionate entomologists make their way to Cincinnati to care for the animals and work in the insect lab, including Kelli Walker, senior keeper at World of the Insect.
Walker’s long career working with invertebrates started in 1990 as a volunteer for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Eventually, she became the insect zoo technician at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and got her start in zoos as the lead keeper of entomology at the San Diego Zoo before moving to Cincinnati in 2017. Now, she oversees the entire six-legged (and sometimes eight-or-more-legged) operation at World of the Insect.
What is it about invertebrates that drew you in?
I knew I wanted to go to school for zoology, and I thought I was going to do marine animals. Once I got my volunteer job working with insects, that’s really what changed my mind. It’s the biggest group of animals on the planet. There’s always something to learn. There are always new animals to work with and that’s one of the advantages that we have here. What we’re working with right now could change next year, because we might get a different group of animals in and it might be animals we’ve never seen before. It’s a challenge to figure out how to take care of them, how to raise them, how to just keep them alive. There’s always something to learn.
How often do the species in the house switch?
We have the staples—things that are popular and we have all the time, like leafcutter ants, stick insects, things like that. But maybe once or twice a year, we’ll get something in that we’ve never worked with before, and it doesn’t always necessarily go on display. Just because we’re getting it in doesn’t mean that guests are able to see it. We have a keeper area that’s behind the scenes, and it might reside there the whole time because it might not be a good exhibit animal because they hide. Insects like to hide.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
There’s a whole process of having an assembly line of different generations within the lab. How does that work?
It depends on the animals you’re working with. Beetles are probably the best example of that, because of their life stages. They go through the same stages as a butterfly—there’s egg, larva, pupa, and adult. There’s about a two-year span that you’re working with one animal, because you have the egg stage. Once the egg hatches, that larva could take two years before it pupates and becomes an actual beetle. So that’s two to three years right there that you’re working with one specific animal. We’ve got 100 going at one time.
Most of what I work with, and the longest living animal that I work with, is a tarantula. We had a tarantula that lived about 24 years. That’s pretty rare with a lot of the animals that we have, because insects have such short lifespans, but some of them, like beetles, can be on the more challenging end.
Are all World of the Insect keepers responsible for that propagation in the lab, or is that a specific group of people?
We have four full-time keepers and all of us are responsible for certain species so they can get more specialized care. For example, I do leaf cutter ants, stick insects, anything venomous—tarantulas, scorpions, things like that. Amanda [Schauer] does our beetles, our millipedes, and our roaches. April [Pitman] does all the reptiles that we have in the building because she’s our reptile specialist. She does all our aquatic insects and our Death Feigning Beetles. And then Mandy [Pritchard] does our American Burying Beetle project, which is our conservation project.
I’ve been working with stick insects and tarantulas for a relatively long time. When I was hired here, I had been doing that at San Diego Zoo. They have the same species there that we have here, so it just worked out perfectly. But we are all trained to do everything in the building if something happens. So, if somebody’s on vacation or out for an extended period of time, we can step in and do their animals.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
How does feeding work for all the insects?
Everything that’s on exhibit, we do in the morning. We have two hours in the morning where we can go through and feed everybody. Everything has a feeding schedule, so not everything necessarily gets fed every day. They have food every day, but certain beetles, for example, get their food changed three times a week, but they always have food in there with them. We plan it out so certain things will get fed on certain days. Tarantulas, for example, only get fed once a week. Every Sunday I do that. Their metabolism is very slow, so they don’t need to be fed every day.
And then anything that’s a leaf eater—stick insects, leafcutter ants, things like that—do get food on a daily basis, so I usually take about an hour of my day to go out and cut plants. Luckily, everything that they eat I can cut on zoo grounds, which is helpful. And then we also work with our commissary department to get fruits and vegetables for all the vegan animals that we have. The millipedes, roaches, things like that, will get fruits and vegetables, which we get in only twice a week.
What does the average day look like?
Typically, we’re out in the lobby for the first two hours in the morning, and then we’re all behind the scenes for the rest of the day. When we go in the keeper area, we all split up into our own aisles. That’s what we really focus on throughout the day. We’re going through and cleaning out tanks and feeding. Some of them have male and females together so they’re constantly breeding. But we have things that happen weekly, we have things that happen monthly, and then we have things that happen only every six months, such as cleaning out big exhibits and pulling eggs. As you can imagine, insects lay a lot of eggs, so depending on the species we’ll do things like that every few months or so.
For a typical day, it’s a lot of cleaning. I don’t think people realize how much cleaning we do. We also have a butterfly aviary. We get butterfly shipments in once a week that we have to process. We get them in the chrysalis form, and we hang those up once a week. And then as the butterflies emerge, we’’ll put the butterflies in the aviary.
Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Are there any animals that you would consider your favorite?
When I was at the San Diego Zoo, I got to work with a coconut crab, and it was pretty incredible. They’re known to be hard to keep in captivity, and they need a lot of space. So, they’re very challenging and pretty smart. It was amazing to work with them. We didn’’t think we were really going to have them that long because of the reputation that they have for being hard to care for. He was probably there for close to 10 years. They live to be like 60. His name was Kenny.
Are there any in World of the Insect that you would consider your current favorite?
Probably the leafcutter ants. They’re extremely complex, and I’m always learning something new about them. The oldest one we have just turned 11 and the queens live about 15 years. They can live a long time, but they always keep me on my toes. They’re just really fun to learn about. I really like working with them, and the guests really like them too.
Is there anything else you want people to know about World of the Insect?
Insects are very underestimated. Unfortunately, I’m used to it at this point. We spend a lot of our time trying to convince people that insects are cool and they’re not as scary as they think they are. We always try and encourage people to come through our building and ask any questions that they have and let them know insects are very, very important to every ecosystem that they’re in, and our world would be a very different place without them. I like sharing that with people. You might like them if you were introduced to one.
Facebook Comments