Weekend Preview: La Posada, Vend Arts, theNAT's Living Lab

Speaker 1: 00:00 There's a lot to tell you about in our weekend preview on Saturday night tap into the giving spirit of the season by attending central cultural Del Roz's LA Posada. It is the Centro's final fundraiser of the year as they continue to revitalize the space. Then venture to little Italy for the second edition of vend arts in art exhibits space that showcases affordable art in a vending machine at Porto Vista hotel. That's right. You can buy and collect four by six inch art from a vending machine, a K PBS arts reporter, Beth doc Amando who suggest checking out the San Diego natural history museums recently opened living lab where you can meet some creepy crawly and slimy slithery residents of our region. She speaks with the Nads entymology [inaudible] Michael Wall. Speaker 2: 00:45 The museum has recently opened an exhibit that features something that we don't always expect from the Nat, which is living creatures. So what does this exhibit? Speaker 3: 00:53 Yeah, it's called the living lab and it's 30 ish. Different living species of critters, mostly reptiles, amphibians and insects and spiders and things that maybe people might not have a love for. A lot of love for, unless they're the special kind of person like me that really loves the creepy crawlies and the slower, the reason the slime these, but they're all from our region and the idea and many of them are things that you could possibly find in your backyard and the idea is to familiarize people with their six legged friends and four legged friends that are doing some important things in our ecosystems, but that we might not necessarily fully understand. Speaker 2: 01:33 You have some flesh-eating beetles here. What are those? Speaker 3: 01:36 Yeah, so those are the domestic beetles that we have in the exhibit are what we actually use within the museum to de flesh, our vertebrate specimens. That's the skeletons basically before they go into the collection. And so there are also another name for them and it's like hide beetles or skin Beatles and that's kind of aptly named because what they do is feed on the dry flesh of sort of mummified skeletons. Speaker 2: 02:05 Since you are the entomologist, I'll talk to you a little more about the bugs and insects that are at the exhibit. There's also stink beetles that people are probably familiar seeing. [inaudible]. Yeah, Speaker 3: 02:15 so the stink beetle is definitely something people are familiar with hiking around. Typically kind of at dusk or on a cloudy day. They tend to be a little bit more active. And you, when you encounter one, if you get a little too close, you might see them raise their rear end up in the air. And of course they're threatening you that if you come too close or handle them, they're going to ooze some stink out on you. And so you as a skunk or some would be predicated or you know, you could imagine getting that blasted up in your nose as you're snorting around trying to find a meal. But there is a mouse called the grasshopper mouse that has figured them out. And what it does is it runs up to them. It grabs them, flips them over, and then eats them from the top down like an ice cream cone, and they just leave the, the stinky bits, uh, left planted the ground. You Speaker 2: 03:00 always have the best stories. What is the purpose of this exhibit in the sense of, uh, do you want people to see these creatures up close to kind of be less afraid of them or be more familiar with them? Speaker 3: 03:11 Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're trying to develop empathy for the nature in our backyard, the nature within our region. And so, you know, getting a little bit of a closer look, there's a little bit of, uh, explanations of, uh, their biology, what their role is in the ecosystem. And then we also have someone who is working in the exhibit who will walk people through sort of the, the sort of important ecosystem services that these things might provide. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get to see them feeding a rattlesnake or a handling, uh, Rosie bow of some kind. Speaker 2: 03:47 And because you're an entomologist, I want to ask you, you know, we're very careful these days about how we label things in groups. When's the correct time to use insect versus bug versus beetle versus arachnid? Speaker 3: 04:00 The bug is a tricky one. There's multiple stories about the etymology of the word bug, but one potential story of its etymology, not entomology, but etymology is that it's from a middle English word, B, U, G, G, E, which is like a ghost or a goblin. The idea is that the original bug, that thing people called bugs were bedbugs. And so if you got visited by a ghost or a goblin in the middle of the night, you might wake up with like sores all over your body. So that was the original bug. And since then, like it's just kind of been expanded out to include, I think anything that bugs you. So there is no right answer to be honest with you. You know, they're scientific names. We can talk about Insecta and hexapod and an arachnid de and things like that. But I don't tend to get too pedantic about the common names that people call things. We all get it. Insect bug. Speaker 2: 04:54 And at this exhibit there are going to be more than just bugs. So what else can people find? Speaker 3: 04:59 Yeah. So there's a variety of insects and spiders and bugs, but then a good number of snakes and lizards. And then also we've got some very cute toads that are in there as well. Speaker 2: 05:10 Explain a little bit about what the museum does behind the scenes that involves research and, and, and is the reason why you keep living specimens here? Speaker 3: 05:18 Yeah, so we've got an entire division of researchers and in almost every sort of biological discipline that you can think of. And we have all these collections behind the scenes as well. Right now I think we're up to about 8 million, um, specimens behind the scenes. And what we do with that, those collections is that they truly represent our natural history. They are vouchers for our natural history. And so we do research on change over time. We can actually sort of look at climate change through collections because we can actually see what life was like a long time ago versus how it is now. And so we're storing these collections or preserving these collections for posterity and for the future, but also actively using them now for a variety of things. And really trying to focus on biodiversity and conservation. That's really how we see our role moving forward. Okay. Well, I want to thank you for talking about your living exhibit. Of course. My pleasure. Thanks. Speaker 1: 06:16 That was Beth AGA, Mondo speaking with Michael Wall. The nets living lab pairs well with its photographic exhibit, insects face to face, both of which will be on display well into 2020.