UNO documentary: Talking bugs with Zack Lemman

Who: Zack Lemman

Film by: UNO student and filmmaker Zachary Toole

Editor’s Note: NolaVie partners with students of UNO professor László Zsolt Fülöp, pairing them with artists, non-profits, environmental groups, and cultural entities to facilitate a live curriculum that results in a short documentary. This short documentary is the work of Zachary Toole, a student in the “Introduction to Documentary Production” class taught by Laszlo Fulop in the Film Department at the University of New Orleans, and his time with “bug guy” Zack Lemman.

My name is Zack Lemman, and I am the curator of animal collections at Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium. A curator is typically someone who organizes, and in many cases displays, a collection of items. In this case, the items are live bugs.

Most people, if they see a butterfly flying by–if its got some nice colors to it–they’re intrigued. I think at a certain level humans are color junkies. I like what everybody likes about bugs, which is if they’re big, that’s impressive; if they’re colorful, that’s eye-catching and pleasing; I find it inherently fascinating to learn that this thing is a specialist and only eats X, or this thing has to hunt for prey, and here’s how it does it, but it’s flexible, and it can hunt for different animals in different ways. The lifestyles, if you will, of these things, which are extraordinarily diverse have always been pretty intriguing to me.

In second grade I was one of maybe 24 kids in a classroom, and our teacher knew a local lady here in New Orleans, where I grew up, who raised monarch butterflies. Each of us got a monarch caterpillar, and we got to raise it and watch it become a butterfly. That’s the spark that got me excited about this.

If I’m outside in an area where I can find bugs, I’m a happy person. It brings me joy, like eating a chocolate bar. I like busting open logs, turning over rocks, and I don’t mind swinging a net around, but I like to unearth things that are hidden. I like the pursuit.

One of the things that makes me happy is to be able to answer questions, and it’s bugs that I can answer questions about. If you have a picture of a caterpillar from your backyard, I can probably share some knowledge about it and in an excited fashion that might get you jazzed about bugs too.

I was at the zoo from [19]92 all the way until I started being an Insectarium employee, which was even before we opened. Strictly speaking, this museum opened in June of 2008, and I’ve certainly been here since then. I was involved in the planning, what the animal collection was going to look like, and what the scientific content was going to be.

There are a lot of TV entities that find out there’s an Insectarium, and they want our help with one thing or another. I got to do a shoot with National Geographic. They were shooting a 3-D IMAX film and bugs were a significant part of it. It was just a warehouse near here, but we had to figure out what bugs we could take off site and bring there. We had to figure out what bugs we could toss in the air so they could get footage of them flying without us worrying about them escaping.

There was [also] once a program about swarms. They wanted to show masses of insects, not necessarily insects that were migrating or moving, which is what we associate with a swarm. We went and got some mammals of varying sizes that were no longer alive. In June, we set them in a greenhouse so that they could be at a stage where flies would find them attractive for egg laying. Therefore, a swarm of maggots would be visible. One scene involved me pretending to explore a dumpster and going, ‘Ah ha! Look what I found, a dead rat!’ There was the rat full of maggots.

When we had our nature center up and running before Hurricane Katrina–it just reopened–their educational director wanted to do an edible insect event, and I was called because I was the ‘bug guy’ at the zoo. I had never done any bug cooking before, so it was like, ‘Learn how to do this, Zack.’ Three months after I did it, I found myself on the Tonight Show cooking bugs. Locally, people remember that, and it’s really funny. A lot of times friends will introduce me and say, ‘Zach was on the Tonight Show,’ as if cooking bugs makes up a substantial part of what I do everyday, and it doesn’t. Even though we have a lot of people here who can cook bugs and do a great job, I’m sort of the bug chef that gets called to other places, so I’ll do events around the country and in some cases in other countries.

My larger goal as curator of the animal collection is to make sure that the roughly 70 live bug exhibits we have here have animals, that there are back-up animals at the lab that are being raised, so if something catastrophic happens we can replace them. I have to maintain contacts with suppliers of these animals if we’re not rearing them ourselves. And the exhibits that are here that you would come to see as a guest on a given day need to look good. There needs to be a graphic; it needs to have accurate information in large enough font size so people can read it. Usually once that’s set, you don’t have to change it a whole lot.

We have to keep in mind the fact that there are so many–billions and billions–of these things that they’re bound to be important by sheer mass. What you’ve got are these things that pollinate plants, aerate soul, decompose and recycle nutrients, and form an integral base for food pyramids. If you take bugs out of natural systems where all of those things are happening, all of those things don’t happen. You get terrestrial ecosystems that just fall apart. I love tigers and whales as much as the next guy, and I know we’d be a poorer planet if they were gone, and it would be sad. I would miss them as much as anyone else. But, we as a species would be fine. From a purely anthropocentric or selfish standpoint, we better care about bugs because if they’re out of the picture, we have a problem. Most people don’t stop and think about that. I don’t say that to be a dire-consequences environmental doom-and-gloom kind of person. I just want to point out to folks that we need them.