Exploring Nuevo Durango: Casa de los Insectos

Welcome to the House of Insects, Nuevo Durango

Ismael - The Museum's Caretaker and Resident Insect Expert

Our days in Nuevo Durango have been filled with adventures of many types.  For being such a small town, there really is so much to do!  On the edge of town, we visit the Casa de los Insectos, an insect museum with quite an interesting story.  Ismael, the son-in-law of the museum's forefather (who passed away in 2006), led our tour and told us the details how such an extensive collective of bugs exists in a town of fewer than 300 people.  There are more than 2,000 insects in the museum,  which focuses primarily on species from the region and has about a thousand visitors each year.  

The famous cucaracha (cockroach) - along with other insects

Wasps collected this year

The community's tradition of collecting insects began more than thirty years ago, when a man named Eduardo Cecilio Welling from Southern California met Pedro Canche May and offered him a strange job: collecting and preserving insects which Welling would sell or keep for his collection in the U.S.  While most insects that Don Pedro catalogued were exported by Welling, several cigar boxes of insects, with their detailed labels, would become part of the museum's initial collection.  Enrique, one of Nuevo Durango's residents, remembers catching butterflies as a young child which were sold to manufacture makeup.  During the early-eighties, the nation's financial crisis meant hardship and suffering for the small town.  It was the income from bug-collecting that kept the village alive during these years.  The 2-3 pesos earned for each insect sold to Welling "meant that we could eat," recalls Enrique.  Manuel (see previous post) also remembers these years and the villagers' identity as "bug collectors".  Ironically, the insect trade has recently been revived in the town, as children collect live butterflies which are sold to a company who resells them for release at weddings and other celebrations.  In 2012, the butterflies sell for more than 20 pesos each, ten times their value three decades ago.

           Pic - Transmits Chagas Disease

Lovely Specimens from 2012

To this day, Ismael continues collecting insects for Casa de los Insectos, which are labeled "New Collection 2012" and comprise the center displays of the museum.  The specimens are categorized according to species and orders of insects.  A short description accompanies some insects, such as the Pic (Chinche), a dangerous beetle who is found in the woods and causes a disease like cancer, I'm told.  I recognized this beetle from a my undergraduate parasitology course as the vector for Chagas disease.  It's not a type of cancer, but rather the T. cruzi protozoan which is transmitted by the Pic insect, which we call the kissing bug.  Early signs of Chagas disease include a characteristic swollen eye.  Incredibly, millions of people in Mexico and Latin America unknowingly carry the disease, which will cause debilitating heart and digestive problems in some.  Like malaria, one strategy for prevention is sleeping with a bed net, as the Pic usually sucks its victims' blood at night.  Ismael told us that some cases of the disease have occurred in hunters, who were bitten at night while hunting in the forest for the illusive and highly-prized, tepezcuintle, the rodent for which the town's alternative tourism project is named after (A'aktun Jaleeb - Cave of the Tepezcuintle in Maya).

Wooding carvings in N. Durango, including the famous Tepezcuintle or Jaleeb (left)

The museum also houses an incredible collection of beetles, several of which we saw around (and inside) of our cabana during our stay!  Most memorable, perhaps, is the elephant beetle who can grow to more than five inches in diameter.  We observed several species of leaf-cutter ants (also spotted throughout our days in the jungle) who are, in a sense, some of the most ancient farmers of the region.  These ants grow, fertilize and harvest a fungi, which is their food source.  In return, the ants feed the fungi, with chewed up pieces of leaves.  The ants are also capable of producing an antibiotic, which kills a bacteria that attacks their precious food, the fungi.

 Butterflies of the Region.. one of several cases

Scorpions, spiders, and a white snake...just because

Near the Arachnid display, which included many scorpions and spiders, I was grateful to confirm that a large brown spider (about 2 inches in diameter) that I spotted during my shower the previous evening, was not venomous.  The Arachnid display was not completely reassuring, however, as I found out that not all specimens in the museum are "preserved".  It just happened that a live scorpion scurried by as we were observing the labeled arachnids.  Ismael tells me not to worry - while the sting would be painful, it's not deadly. I appreciate the advice, but I prefer a visit to the museum with dead insects!

Will checks out some of the original collection...
moments after our scorpion encounter