Royal Ontario Museum - Insect Exhibits 1

Well this is certainly different and there are a lot more insects than usual! Must be a special occasion, and it absolutely is! I’m dedicating this post to Ally, one of my dearest friends and a major inspiration for this blog. We’ve known each other for around 7 years now, having met in U of T’s 3rd year Insect Biology course. We’ve been on many a bug hunt together (and hopefully more in the future)! She loves insects even more than I do, so much so that she continues to study entomology at the University of Guelph, alongside the role the many insects play in the environment! I’m so proud of her! Hop onto Google Scholar to discover her work on the insect world or check out her blog to see her insight: Ecology for Life (@Ecology_forlife). In honoring her today, today’s showcase will briefly cover the ROM’s amazing insect collections* and how museums are useful for insect research and inspiring interest. Thank you for everything, dearest Bug Princess! May fortune continue to smile upon you!

While it may not specialize in insects, the ROM boasts some amazing collections of insects. There are quite a few tropical and exotic species to see including such notable finds like the Atlas Moth (Attacus atlas), the Peanut-Head Lanternfly (Fulgora laternaria), the many shimmering, iridescent Butterflies including the Blue Morpho (Morpho spp.) and Green Birdwing (Ornithoptera priamus), giant Stick Insects, Cicadas, tropical Grasshoppers and many Beetles like the ornate and horned Scarabs, the giant Harlequin Beetles (Acrocinus longimanus) or even oddities like the Violin Beetle (Mormolyce phyllodes). While these are fantastical, there are also bug boxes that contain insect species that are more familiar to us, allowing patrons to compare the insects of our region with those on the other side of the world. They might even recognize a few from their neighborhood. That organized Butterfly box has certainly been a useful reference for the identification of a few species. Honestly, picture don’t do it justice; if you’re an insect enthusiast, see these collections in person and notice that there’s also 1 spider and 1 centipede mounted as well.

Alongside the showcase of modern day insects within the ecology and biodiversity sections of the ROM, they are showcased in one other area too. The fossil section of the ROM carries fossilized insects (or fossil preservations) both in stone and within resin (look for the those in the ancient mammal area). These fossils are placed alongside their modern counterparts to highlight the changes time has brought to the world of arthropods. It seems many of them have gotten a little bit smaller. While the morphology appears consistent, many small changes have taken place over the hundreds of millions of years insects have crawled and flown over the Earth. The age of the fossils can also help us better understand the evolutionary timeline of these little creatures. All this while behind the scenes there are dedicated personnel working hard to push science and our understanding of the natural world forward! And of course, if all this insight into the scope and grandeur of the insect world isn’t enough, there are live insects to observe and enjoy at the ROM too including a Honeybee nest, Darkling Beetles, Walking Sticks and Hissing Roaches. And this is just one museum; many other institutions bring their own amazing contributions to the collective knowledge of insects.

*Note: Since these insect collections belong to the ROM, I’ve marked them with the Mantis icon. The poster is mine though. When things are safe/back to normal, I’ll return to the ROM for a follow-up (and I did return with new insect showcases: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |).