I used to be deathly afraid of bugs. Whenever I would visit Taiwan in the summers as a kid, I would live with my grandparents in their humble house in the urban streets of Taichung. There would be these giant cockroaches darting in and out of the shadows in the living room, kitchen, bathroom…you name it. It was just an avoidable fact of life when you lived in a decades old house without proper door seals or screen doors in the tropics.

My grandma would be just as scared of these roaches as I was, always screaming and calling for my grandpa to kill them whenever she saw one. Despite her fear of cockroaches however, she would always take me to her workplace at the insect department at the Taiwan National Museum of Natural Science. It was here I would spend hours looking at vast insect collections and building these little models of various bugs. It was here I would learn to appreciate the diversity and importance of these small and otherwise pesky animals.

I remember she would always take me to the park whenever it was cicada season. We would walk and collect hundreds of cicada nymph exoskeletons that were attached to great towering trees (that’s a picture of me holding a cicada nymph from this past summer). By the end of the summer I would have a large mason jar full of these exoskeletons to show for it.

I can’t say exactly when I stopped fearing bugs, but I can say that my visits to Taiwan were a huge part of learning to appreciate them. Today, I keep several species of tropical roaches, tarantulas, and scorpions as a hobby and I am going into my 2nd year as an Entomology major here at UGA!