Fool around with creepy, crawly giant insects at Victoria's goofy bug zoo

VICTORIA, B.C. — What can you say about Liberty Excedera St. Louis except that she's out to bug you?

Excedera, as she prefers to be known, interprets creepy-crawler behavior at the Victoria Bug Zoo for kids who sit enthralled at her beetle-tattooed ankles to hear her tales of bug love and potty habits.

"I'm also well-known for putting bugs on kids faces," she threatened visitors one day last fall.

"Oooh, that's disgusting," someone sneered.

Exactly.

But by the time most of these kids are outta here, they'll have happily unwrinkled their noses and fought each other for a chance to try a millipede mustache, stare into a mantis's big bug eyes, kiss the bright red lips of a dragon-headed cricket and — if all doesn't go well — inhale the acrid spray of a threatened vinegaroon.

The zoo houses 2 million ants and hundreds of other swarming, crawling, leaping, flying, hissing wildlife in two boudoir-sized rooms in a nondescript building just a few blocks from the famous Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria.

Excedera, who has a degree in biology and a job most adults wouldn't want at any salary, knows all those squirmy arthropods intimately.

The first bugs on her tour are the stick insects and mantises.

A giant African millipede does an impression of a mustache as it hangs, with all 400 legs, to the upper lip of a visitor.

"It's a myth that the females bite the heads off the males after mating," Excedera told a tour group of pint-sized people one afternoon. "It happens, but usually only in captivity and if they don't have enough to eat. They don't mate out of love, so to her, he's just another bug. Or bug dinner if she's hungry."

The chartreuse-hued katydid has ears on its knees, Excedera said, while the male thorny devil beetle has little protective barbs on its legs that are used as fish hooks by the human natives of its home, New Guinea.

The janitor of the jungle? It's the dung-rolling beetle; and it's quite the romantic. The excrement it spends its waking hours rolling is used "to impress the girls, who lay their eggs in it," Excedera said sweetly.

Given the age of most of her audience — 6 to 9 or so — that was an invitation for a detour into areas other adults might wince at. But fielding bathroom humor is Excedera's forte.

"We all poop and fart," she shrugged, "even bugs."

Weird and tickly

Moving along, she pulled a thick black African millipede out of its glass cage as a dozen hands shot up in the air to a chorus of "me firsts."

Who wouldn't want a millipede to crawl across his or her upper lip, Pancho Villa-style?

"This is so weird it'll make your eyes water," Excedera warned, putting the many-limbed critter on the scrunched up face of a boy. "It doesn't hurt; it's just very weird and tickly feeling.

"So how does it feel?"

"Ike welcro," the volunteer mumbled, lips locked in hopes the critter wouldn't try anything weird if he didn't provoke it.

Even though this is a petting zoo, some of the inhabitants aren't invited out to play.

The bite of a tarantula isn't deadly, Excedera explained, but it is painful, and some may shoot spiny hairs toward anything they deem threatening, hairs that are highly irritating to eyes or mucous membranes.

Excedera brought one out for a closer look, but didn't let the kids handle it.

And stink bugs do cause a stink if they feel endangered.

Some of the kids knew as much insect lore as Excedera — or pretended to.

Most insects are short-lived, she pointed out. Some live 24 hours or less.

"I read about one that lives only 20 seconds," a boy insisted. "They just come out, lay their eggs and then they're outta there."

The kids examined the lives of stick insects, which look for all the world like their brushy surroundings; Madagascar hissing cockroaches, whose "cage" was a well-furnished dollhouse complete with framed portraits of bugs on the wall; blue death-feigning beetles, which roll over and play dead when threatened, and tarantulas named Pinky, Fluffy and Daisy, who each get a cockroach dinner once a week.

They eat half on the spot, Excedera noted, and then spin a silk "doggy bag" to wrap the other half in for later.

A woman's world

Subterranean leaf-cutter ants occupy three walls of one room, in a metropolis of interconnected clear plastic tubes.

Two million worker ants live there with their mother, the queen. She lives for 15 years, as opposed to three weeks for her kids, all daughters.

And how do the ants make babies in this all-girl world?

Well, said Excedera, some poorly understood environmental cue in the wild causes queens to create a group of males, which mate with neighbors in other anthills.

Here in their see-through condo complex at the zoo the sisters are content to live without love, she added.

Some in Excedera's rapt audience were perfectly happy to listen to the stories and skip the kid-to-bug contact.

"I didn't touch anything," said Janessa Woodfield, 9, of Spokane, there with her 11-year-old sister, Josi, and their parents.

"I don't like bugs," Janessa said, wrinkling her nose and launching a defense she'd been working on ever since her parents told her they were going to the bug zoo.

"I told them I don't like bugs that can jump or fly. I don't like big bugs and I don't like little bugs. Really, I don't like any bugs at all.

"They bug me."

That's probably what the millipede tells the blue death-feigning beetle about humans whenever he sees Liberty Excedera St. Louis coming with another kid who can't wait to grow a mustache.

Copyright © The Seattle Times Company

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