Insect Discovery Days 2017

On August 12^th, The Birds of Prey Centre of Alberta hosted their annual Insect Discovery Days to encourage budding scientists to explore the world of the creepy crawlies. This year, the Lethbridge branch of HPI worked in collaboration with the Birds of Prey Centre to introduce children to another dimension of the creepy – parasites!

Dr. Cam Goater, Sarah Unrau, and I spent our morning and afternoon grossing people out with parasite facts. Participants that visited our booth engaged with us to discuss and learn about the fascinating world of parasites. Hylella shrimp infected with an Acanthocephalus parasite were displayed to demonstrate the photophilic behaviour manipulation incurred by infection. The larvae of a canine botfly caused shudders to children as we told them how they crawl in your skin. However, it wasn’t just grossed out children that visited us, but also those who had genuine interests to explore parasite biology. We even had a little girl remark ‘I want to feel what a botfly larvae feels like under my skin’! We were excited to encourage the curiosity of the next generation of scientists.

Similar to our last outreach event, we displayed parasites from a variety of different groups, both dead and alive. As always, the Ascarid worms drew a crowd as did our Dicrocoelium dendriticus set-up showcasing all the life stages of the behaviour-manipulating parasite. To integrate insects into our booth, Cam brought a couple praying mantises along with horsehair worms to show the potential parasites found inside the mantids. The two mantids were very popular, being friendly enough to crawl on those who dared to hold them.

Insect Discovery Days was a very successful and fun event and we hope to continue our collaboration with the Birds of Prey Centre of Alberta in the future! We would also like thank the Birds of Prey Centre of Alberta for hosting this event.