As a child, I remember seeing the quasi-children’s movie Coraline and being utterly horrified. Its unique disturbing nature, to me, comes from the copious amount of motifs and references to insects & bugs. At the beginning of the movie, Coraline smashes a bunch of bugs at her apartment; after she enters the Other World, she is brought to a room full of giant beetle guardians; and at the end, the Other Mother is literally revealed to be a grotesquely mechanical spider trying to capture Coraline in her web. The movie does an incredible job at portraying insects as vehemently disgusting creatures to the viewers, but symbols of fascination to the Other Mother. The latter is the topic for this blog.
I was recently assigned to compete in the category of Entomology for my school’s Science Olympiad team. I had to learn the ins-and-outs of insect identification and answer various questions about them. Along the way, I stumbled across videos of “Insect Pinning Tutorials” and discovered the niche hobby of insect collecting.
All across the world, amateur and professional entomologists collect, preserve, and display different insects, either for scientific or for fun. At this point, my fear of insects had largely dissolved, and I became intrigued by what I was seeing. There are so many intricate rules that come with preserving insects, rules that would’ve never even occurred to me if I were to begin my own collection. Most collectors tend to pin insects to a styrofoam board, placing the pins meticulously through their body at various angles. Because of these complicated procedures that come with insect collection, this blog should not serve as a tutorial on insect collection, but rather an exploration of the hobby.
The activity of insect collection is intrinsically tied to art, yet it is most often referred to as a scientific discipline. I think the hobby can be summed up through one of Emily Dickinson’s iconic poem verses: “The Spider as an Artist Has never been employed- Though his Surpassing Merit Is freely certified.” It turns out that entomology is an art that, like Dickinson suggests, doesn’t have to be transactional. People collect insects for their own enjoyment, and it doesn’t have to be mainstream. I think, very much like the Other Mother (minus the malicious intent), insect collecting can be a rewarding and scientifically fulfilling experience. Of course, there continues to be a debate about the ecological impacts, as most insect collectors unfortunately have to catch and euthanize their own specimens. However, I think that can be remedied through what I call “targeted collection,” where you’d only collect local invasive species. Where I live, there are plenty of emerald ash borer beetles which destroy trees, so there’s an avenue that I could look into if I were to ever kickstart my dreams of becoming an amateur entomologist.
Below, I have left some links to some helpful videos and websites if you ever wanted to start your own insect adventures!
https://blog.entomologist.net/why-should-we-collect-insects.html
UFEntomology – YouTube
Entomological Collection | The New York State Museum
