Vancouver Island - part 2, The Bug Zoo

Who thinks 'bugs? no thanks' ?

Like bugs, don't like bugs, find them interesting, find them creepy, no matter what you think this is one place I would highly recommend to everyone! It was 2 large joined rooms with glass enclosures (varied big fish tank sizes) with different insects and arachnids along all the walls. You pay a small fee and there is a 'tour guide' who gives a continuous tour who you can join at anytime and leave when he starts at your spot again. He was very informative and would take the creatures out (most of the time) and let you hold them.

There were mostly stick/leaf/mantis insects, beetles, spiders, unique insects (water bees), an ant colony, cockroaches. The ant colony was fascinating, these particular ants would chew up leaves and spit them out in particular ant rooms which would then cultivate fungi off the leaves which is what they actually lived off. I tried hard to get close up shots of the fungi rooms, the ants, anything, it just refused to focus (something for me to learn about!), but I got a panorama shot for you :). It was pretty cool, they had 'tunnels' covering half of 1 room, across the short end of said room and part of the other wall. They had a 2 rubbish tips and a dump room which had a huge pile of dead ants. We learnt all about the hive mind and if the queen would die then the entire colony would lose the will to live and cease their activities. When the queen produced another queen it would accompany it with a whole swarm of flying males whose sole purpose was to mate with that 1 queen and die. The new queen would establish a new nest and could proceed to lay a staggering amount (30 million might be close), that 1 mating was all it needed. All the ant types in the colony were female.


We learnt what each bug did in defense, each was very different, 1 beetle would play dead, 1 would flip a huge somersault, 1 would shoot super stinky oil on you, 1 cockroach would hiss at you. The tarantula was very interesting, if threatened it would rub its back legs together and on its abdomen and fling its hairs at you, which would be hard to get off but cover your eyes, nose and mouth with the most itchy stinging sensation ever. Personally I'd prefer to get bitten! Its fangs were an inch long (curved) and the penetration would do more injury then the venom.

top left- tarantula, thats my hand, my hand, my hand! top right-- centipede, I'd never seen one in real life until I moved to Woombye and we've had quite a few drown in our pool. One night, while watching a movie in the darkened garage there was this scurry, like a big rat or lizard, we jumped up and turned on the lights and this centipede went from one end of the room to the other in a blink, I had a brief look but it looked at least a foot long. We never found it, but I've been looking for 'the one that got away' ever since. Apparently they don't grow that big.
bottom left- millipede, both centipedes and millipedes do not have 100 and 1000 legs, they in fact have anything from 10 to hundreds, but never exactly 100 :). bottom right- scorpion under ultraviolet light.

We saw the tarantula at the end of the tour actually and I'd been fearlessly interested in assorted creatures, handling them and encouraging the kids but this was, well, the big one. When I was younger I had arachnophobia; I know it was because it grew over time until it was irrational. It reached a point where a friend decided to chase me around a house holding a dead spider and trapped me in a room by putting it in the open doorway. I couldn't step over it.
After that I could recognise my fear for what it was and how involuntary it was and I could only pray about it. I had opportunity to get up close and personal with spiders over the next year in biology and at home resealing the house's outside wall and my fear turned into fascination. But, they still creep me out! So when he asked if I'd like to hold the tarantula I knew I had to; I held out my hand, looked at the wall and made my mind blank (as if I was preparing to swallow tablets lol) and realised I was holding my breath after he put it on my hand. When I slowly unwound my subconsciously tensed muscles I actually enjoyed the experience!! It was like a mouse, and it was so big I can imagine how people could get attached to them as pets.
I challenge you all to hold one sometime in your life!

We learnt the black widow was identical to our red back in all but the red stripe. And our red backs actually ate their mates a higher percentage of the time then the black widow! The less time the male spent mating the higher its chances of being eaten, which in turn would do the species a favor by sustaining the female when it obviously wasn't use for much else ;).

black widow. She had the most amazing web, finest I've seen, it looked like cloth, you couldn't see the strands.

The millipede was a hit too, its legs were segmented along its body in twos - two would go forward to meet the two in front and then backward to meet the two behind, it was fascinating. And to let 1 walk on you it felt like .. like smooth, rippling velcro walking on you, but not prickly.

There was a scorpion which Blythe held, actually I couldn't bring myself to hold it! and we saw its luminescence under ultra violet light; there is no definitive reason why they do that.. This particular 1 doesn't use its sting, but its pincers which could still do damage but was probably therefore safer to hold. All of the handled creatures were quite passive, we were still encouraged to leave them in their natural habitat if we came across them though ;).


All in all the Bug Zoo is probably in the top 4 things we did in the whole trip and probably the top 2 for the kids (snow being the other one ;)). I was also excited to have the chance to take some macro shots, but when they were in our hands they wouldn't stop moving, and in the glass reflections get in the way. Still a lot of photographic fun :).

We nosed around the bug shop for 5 mins before bolting back to the Empress for our second super special treat. Mum had bought us, as a surprise, a high tea (I've never had one before). Mum asked for a gluten free 'tea', so we started with strawberries and cream and then were served with their specially made Empress tea of which the kids tried too (1 sip in their own special tea cups). 3 tiered cake towers were next with sandwiches (cucumber, smoked salmon + cream cheese, mushroom truffle pate, pickled ginger + salmon pate), scones + jam + cream, petit four cakes.


I wasn't sure of the term petit four and had mistakenly thought it was 'petit mor', so I googled and discovered petit mort was something else entirely lol!! That would have been a funny mistype!


The food was delicious, although the kids were fussy and didn't eat any sandwich except mushroom and cucumber, so I filled up on sandwiches myself :), not such a bad idea if it stops me from eating too much cake ;). We could ask for more of anything we wanted, so I got the kids more scones so they wouldn't eat too much cake either! and we all had half of each type of cake.
The maitre d and host (waiter) were so professional and polite and I was quite nervous at first in our setting of the kids being noisy and well.. kid like :), but after a bit mum reassured me that everyone else there were tourists like us ;), so we relaxed, pulled out the cameras and settled into our normal geekiness.

We were packed off with souvenir boxes of their tea, and went searching for an op shop mum remembered from last time. We popped back into the bug zoo shop on the way. Funny the contrast of the day :) - bug zoo - high tea - op shop. We finally found it, we wanted to get some decently priced snow gear, parkas and water proof shoes! (we'd accidentally left both our coats at home, what a thing to forget in our dash to the airport). We were highly successful, everyone got fitting snow pants but me, mum got a down feather parka, me a waterproof super coat and a few pairs of shoes lol.

top- Parliament building, designed by Francis Rattenbury an architectural protege at age 19, himself an interesting story (google it sometime). bottom- I forgot to include a picture of the wax museum from yesterday, Blythe was much taken with the princesses :).

We grabbed an organic juice/smoothy for dinner and tracked down a button + knitting shop for me, but when we got there we had no time left (and no money, I so need a credit card), and ran for the bus. They were having a Christmas parade hours later but the streets were absolutely packed with people waiting and the road was blocked off. We managed to get into contact with out bus driver and met him else where, and watched our first hockey game on the ferry. Devlin was way over tired and I had to give him smacks :(. Vancouver at night was full of great photo opportunities; even only half a week into our trip we'd already decided if/when we came back we'd hire a car so we could take photos ;). We got home at 9:30pm and found that the hotel concierge had actually cancelled our booking when booking us out yesterday! So we got a different room on the other side.

left- the Fairmont Empress Castle. right- parliament at night.

Next blog is our Vancouver explorations!