FAYETTEVILLE : UA event gives stage to crawly critters
Posted on Friday, October 10, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Thirdgrader and aspiring entomologist Ashlynn Arriaza is fearless as Herford the hissing cockroach creeps up and crawls over her shoulder and down her arm. “Since she was able to walk, she’s been picking up bugs,” says the 8-year-old’s mother, Karen Arriaza of Rogers, as she snaps photos of Ashlynn with Herford, whose painted-on “racing flames” pop against the backdrop of Ashlynn’s lime-green hoodie.
“She’s having a hard time, because bugs are no longer cool,” Karen Arriaza laments as she gazes through the camera’s viewfinder. She is referring not to her daughter’s opinion, but to the social scene at Bellview Elementary School, before adding: “Well, I don’t think they were ever cool.
“ But she still has a passion for them.” The University of Arkansas Insect Festival was the perfect place Thursday for Ashlynn and hundreds of other insect-loving youngsters, many of whom arrived on school buses to take in the live cockroach races, beehives, live butterfly cage, preserved insect displays, cotton gin and other entomology exhibits at the Pauline Whitaker Animal Science Arena.
The arena is nestled on the UA research farm, just north of the Fayetteville campus.
In between cockroach races in which a peppy Herford is almost consistently a second-place finisher, a freckle-faced Ashlynn furrows her brow while trying to recall the bug that started it all for her.
It’s easier to remember her initial fright and the desire to face the fear that followed.
“I found out that bugs are actually cool. They show more cool than fear,” says Ashlynn, whose fascination with insects has led her to become an ant farm proprietor, carry around a National Audubon Society bugidentification book, heckle the family’s exterminator and beg her mother— without success — to let her get her own tarantula.
As Herford and his giant cockroach competitors get behind the starting gates for another round, Kim Foster walks up with his group of first- and second-graders.
“Those guys are big: They’re not from around here,” Foster, a teacher at Ozark Guidance Center’s day treatment program, remarks.
He’s right. Herford and all his nameless buddies owe their ancestry to the moist forests of Madagascar. In fact, they and their ilk, Gromphadorhina portentosa, are often referred to as the Madagascar hissing cockroach.
The hissing, reminiscent of a compressed-air can, wards off predators.
Before each race, entomology graduate students Austin Jones of Garfield and Ryan Allen of DeWitt deposit the cockroaches, all 2-3 inches long, behind the wooden starting gates of a sixlane racing trough.
The gates go up as Jones and Allen tap the trough — and they’re off !
Jones, sporting a ball cap with a Hot Wheels logo, does the play-by-play, calling attention to the occasional “lanejumper,” sideways gait, stubborn squatter or racer heading in reverse.
At one point, he hoists a victorious Herford in the air and croons: “We-e-e are the champions, my fr-i-e-nd — Anyone want to hold the champion ?” Jones, who’s seeking a master’s of science in entomology, encourages race watchers to let the creatures creep across their hands.
“How do you know he’s gross if you don’t pet him ?” he says to one little girl as he strokes Herford’s back. “See ? He feels like a shoe.” To another group, Jones explains roach biology: “You guys see these little black spots on his back ? What do you think those are for ? Are they just decoration ?” Each black spot marks a tiny hole called a spiracle, which is how the cockroaches breathe. “It’s like a pipeline that pipes oxygen into each individual cell,” Jones continues.
Along comes Don Steinkraus, UA entomology professor and godfather to the cockroach clan.
“I’ve had the colony for 20 years now,” Steinkraus says as he points a digital camera high above the racing trough. “The offspring of them are all over the state now.” There’s also a pesky side to the bug world.
Tina Gray Teague, who holds appointments at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro and the UA Division of Agriculture’s experiment station, points to a display that traces how she and many other scientists in the world have battled the boll weevil, a foe of the cotton plant, in North America.
“We’re about to eradicate the boll weevil from Arkansas,” Teague says. “There’s not been a boll weevil spotted north of I-40 this year.” Though the eradication program, which features a pheromone trap, has been controversial among farmers because of its mandates and its expense, for a cotton entomologist like Teague, it has been akin to “curing cancer,” she says.
Elsewhere at the festival, only one of Lori Kranz’ homeschooled sons, 14-year-old Cody, considers himself an “insect person,” and only he liked the feel of a hissing cockroach crawling on the hand.
Kranz of Rogers drove her three sons to the festival Thursday morning, but Dennis, 12, and Evan, 9, preferred the amphibian display.
“They do look nasty,” Lori Kranz said of the Madagascar roaches. “But then, I can see it being a ‘guy’ thing.”
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