Fascination with bugs lands him on TV

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on March 14, 2008

The question is not why Bart Bouricius of Amherst loves bugs.

"The real question is what got someone not interested in bugs. If you're not afraid of them, learning about them is quite interesting," said Bouricius in an interview last week.

Bouricius' exotic bug collection was interesting enough to get him an invitation to the "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" show Monday, as "spider wrangler" for Mark "Dr. Bugs" Moffett, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of entomology" by National Geographic magazine.

Photojournalist, ecologist and adventurer - not necessarily in that order - Moffett is a regular on the talk show circuit, appearing on O'Brien's show as recently as a year ago.

"It's hard to say how deep his love and admiration of the insect world goes," Moffett said of the redheaded talk show host.

"But I think he's a smart enough guy to appreciate that nature is something that fascinates people."

Moffett asked Bouricius to accompany him with Bouricius' prized centipede, millipede, whip spider and scorpion.

"He has an intuition about really strange creatures that people don't think very much about," Moffett said of Bouricius, a treetops walkway builder and researcher who shows the oversized bugs that live in containers in his basement at area schools and museums.

If Bouricius has a favorite bug, it would be the large tailless whip scorpion, otherwise known as a whip spider.

"Either name is problematic, because it's not a scorpion and it's not a spider," Bouricius explained.

Bouricius' giant African emperor scorpion could be among the more unpleasant of his creatures with which to tangle.

"This is one of those ones where it's a case of, Don't do this at home,'" Bouricius said, demonstrating how he takes the scorpion out of its container without getting stung.

But the worst of the lot in terms of toxicity is the tropical centipede, a mean-looking specimen whose sting would feel like the equivalent of "a couple of bad wasp stings put together," Bouricius said.

Some people might fear arachnids because they think they're dangerous.

Bouricius thinks a person only grows to fear bugs because, as he puts it, "Something scared you when you were a kid and you've suppressed the memory."

Only two species in the United States are really dangerous, he said - the black widow spider and the brown recluse spider.

Contrary to what some people might think, not all arachnids are spiders.

"The fact is there are at least 13 different orders of arachnids, and four common orders of arachnids in this area," Bouricius said.

Those would be 1) ticks and mites; 2) "harvestmen," such as the daddy long legs - "which is not a spider," Bouricius said, "not even close"; 3) the pseudo scorpion, which lives in gutters and leaf litter and is not toxic to humans; and 4) spiders.

When it comes to their motivation for celebrating bugs, Moffett and Bouricius are on the same page.

"For me, it's making people fall in love with the unexpected in the natural world," Moffett said.

"I think it's very easy to get excited about a panda, but a lot of nature that we have to keep around and support are things people are a little nervous about. If you tell people about them in the right way, you can get people excited about them."

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.