The Interview: Talking creepers and crawlers with the Academy of Natural Science bug guy

THE CURATOR of the Department of Entomology at the Academy of Natural Sciences doesn't want you to be bugged out by the Academy's newest exhibit - Tarantulas: Alive and Up Close - which opens this weekend.

Sure, tarantulas are the biggest and hairiest of all spiders. And sure, only a pane of glass will separate visitors from 20 different species of the creature - including the largest-known variety, the goliath bird-eating tarantula - but Jon Gelhaus said visitors have nothing to fear and may even get over their fears by confronting them at the exhibit.

Gelhaus, who is also a professor at Drexel University, is a native of Sacramento, Calif. He's lived in the Philadelphia area since 1990, when he came for a job at the Academy.

In a recent conversation with Stephanie Farr, Gelhaus talked about society's fascination with tarantulas, Philly's recent distinction as the second-worst U.S. city for bedbugs and why he loves to give The Very Hungry Caterpillar as a gift.

How did you get into bugs?

I was one of those kids that was always catching something and putting it into a jar. In high school, there was an internship program and I found out there was an entomology lab (in his hometown) I didn't know about.

That was kind of my first realization that there were people that were employed to study insects. This was before the Internet.

I worked with these scientists during the spring semester and they hired me in the summer. That's where I went, "I can do something like this. This is cool."

What do you find attractive about creatures that so many find repellant?

There must have been something innate. I love the natural world, in general, but with insects, the diversity is mind-boggling. There are millions of species on this earth and so few we've been able to document and give names to.

I love that I can just walk out into my yard and by using my eyes I can see all kinds of things going on just in my little patch of garden.

Insects offer us a chance to sit and focus and observe a living thing and ask questions about it. They are there, always.

Why have an exhibit solely on tarantulas?

Well, there's a lot of fascination with the scary and the deadly and the largest and all of that, no matter what we're talking about.

Particularly for a museum like us, where one of our core audiences is families, it's something that will appeal very naturally to families. The kids will really enjoy seeing so many tarantulas up close.

I hate tarantulas, and all bugs, for that matter. Why should I come to see Tarantulas: Alive and Up Close?

It's a very safe environment for you to come and start to experience tarantulas. I think sometimes when we learn more about something a lot of our fears tend to fall away a little bit, particularly something we're scared about.

There just might be enough there that you'd feel more comfortable, so when you saw a spider in your house you'd take a few more minutes to observe it before you ushered it into a pill bottle and took it outside, or however you dispose of it.

And once people see the tarantulas, they can go right next door to the live butterfly exhibit. You can go from maybe the very scary to the very beautiful in a short period of time.

Philadelphia was just named the second worst city for bedbugs. Does this gross you out, like the rest of us, or do you find if fascinating?

Well it's actually pretty fascinating, the resurgence of bedbugs, because when I took entomology you never saw bedbugs. They were something that was really known in the past.

So to see what's happened in the last 10 to 15 years with the resurgence of bedbugs, it caused pest control people to dig back into old literature.

What is your favorite film or book about bugs?

One that I've read a lot to my son is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It's a very simple story telling about the whole process of metamorphosis.

It's something my wife and I will give often to little ones just because it does have an insect emphasis but it's very nicely done.

A caterpillar becoming a butterfly - we all learn that as kids. But if that wasn't part of the knowledge going back a thousand years, we'd never guess that green worm-like thing crawling around would turn into this beautiful butterfly.

It's really a miraculous kind of thing. What I know about caterpillars from raising them is that they are very hungry. All they do is eat and poop. So it's very apt in that sense too.

What is your favorite bug?

There's one I study that's not too many people's favorite, but I study the crane fly.

It's this long-legged fly, there are thousands of species in the world and they do thousands of different kinds of things. They are found on every continent but Antarctica.

I still find wonderful and new and fascinating things about them.