Insects, arachnids and crustaceans at the Macleay

First published on 13 Oct 2011. Updated on 21 Oct 2011.

The smallest insect on display in the Macleay Museum collection at the University of Sydney is a click beetle about the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. It has its own teeny specimen tag adorned with miniscule handwritten squiggles.

 

You won’t have to look too hard to spot the largest insect on display though. The Titan beetle from French Guiana (whose scientific name, Titanus giganteus, says it all really) is the “largest beetle in the world”. The specimen on display is a whopping, longhorned, Kafkaesque monstrosity at over six inches in length, with a dark bronze-brown armoured body and spiky jaws that mean business. Entomologist Alexander Macleay paid five guineas for it at an auction in 1818.

 

The Macleay collection contains more than 600,000 insects taken from all over the world. The Museum doesn’t have nearly as many as that on show at any one time, but it’s still a heck of an impressive display of insect biodiversity, from the shiny Rhinoceros beetle and Alligator-headed lantern fly to the super-rare Scarab beetle and one of only seven specimens of Ceratocanthus aeneus (a wee little fella) in the world. Even the most entomologically at-ease of visitors might feel a slight prickle at the sight of one of Macleay’s original cabinet drawers: it is absolutely overrun with African spiders and creepy-crawlies, dozens and dozens of them, like items in some jewellery display case from an arachnophobe’s nightmare.

 

The unmistakable highlight of the Museum’s insect display, though, is the beautiful blue Morpho butterfly - currently part of the Quest for Red exhibition. The Morpho’s wings reflect, refract and diffract light in such a way that its colours change and shimmer depending on the wavelength and angle of observance. It’s a striking lesson in photophysics, but even more striking to think that it was marvelled over, just as we marvel over it, over 200 years ago – plucked as it was from the sky in 1807.