Torquay Museum sticking up for the little guys

Insect Week is the annual celebration of the ‘little things that run the world.’ It’s there to encourage people of all ages to learn more about insects.
The week is organised by the Royal Entomological Society supported by many partners with interests in science, natural history and the conservation of insects.
This year, Torquay Museum wants to encourage you to visit the new temporary exhibition, Six Legged Superheroes: Insects Saving the Planet. It’s becoming more important then ever to engage with the lives of our insect neighbours and start looking out for the little guys!
It may surprise you to know that the largest collection in the museum, in numbers, is not photographs or bones but 64 cabinets of insects, numbering over 120,000 specimens.

This collection is so large the museum staff have never been able to tackle the cataloguing of it but they have counted it and listed all the cabinets and collectors. They know there are some very rare and important individual collections, particularly the Ashe Collection of British beetles and the Hope Collection of British flies, bees and wasps. These are unusual as many entomologists in the early 20th century concentrated on butterflies and moths.
Many of the museum's insect collections are now approaching 100 years old, most were amassed in the early 20th century and as such represent a snapshot of insect life 100 or so years ago.
Each generation has a different perception of the abundance of insects and what we think of as ‘normal’. I grew up in the 1970s and have vivid memories of masses of dead insects on the windscreen of our car after a long drive, and of seeing many species in the garden as a child.
My perception is almost certainly different from the entomologists of the 1920s and 1930s whose collections fill the museum. In my youth the Swallowtail butterfly was almost mythical due to its rarity, but it appears in abundance in our collections. If we were to travel back another 100 years to a time barely touched by the industrial revolution, I’m sure we would be shocked by the number of insects in the environment.
In creating our latest exhibition, it was a sad moment when museum staff realised that making a display of extinct or endangered British insects was quite easy by going through the collections - with once-common butterflies such as the Black-veined White or the Large Tortoiseshell being present in the collections in large numbers.
The latest exhibition, which presents insects as superheroes supporting ecosystems and explores their incredible superpowers, is designed to make visitors think differently about insects. We still have the ability to make changes and preserve many of the species we have. We can all stop using insecticides and herbicides or create some habitat in our gardens for beetles or bees.
This is the fourth insect exhibition the museum has made in the last 30 years, in the 1990s we didn’t talk about insect declines but now the losses are becoming dramatic. The American Monarch butterfly is perhaps the best emblem of this.
In the 1980s, over 10 million made the western migration from California to Mexico in one of the greatest spectacles in the insect world. Last year less than 2,000 made the trip. There's one on display in the exhibition, soon it might be the only place you will see one.