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Bugging Out

Claudia Atticot

Imagine a praying mantis with eyes as big as your head, a 450-pound daddy longlegs and ants that are 25 feet long. You do not want to find these bugs in your backyard. Unless, of course, they are made out of saplings and the dried-out roots and branches of fully grown trees.

The colossal creatures are part of Big Bugs, an exhibit at the Morton Arboretum, in Lisle, Illinois. Artist David Rogers molded 12 larger-than-life pests using only natural materials. His goal was to create an exhibit that would help kids and adults discover the important role bugs play in our world. "Placing them on such a large scale and reversing the roles, you can't help but get the message," Rogers told TFK. "We take insects for granted."

Rogers got the idea for his creepy-crawly collection in 1990 while in Vermont's Green Mountains. There, he constructed his first sculpture, a 12-foot-tall dinosaur. A year later, the big bugs were born. "I decided to create common insects on a dinosaur scale, and it worked," he says.

Each sculpture takes about a month to complete. The praying mantis took more than three months because the black-locust wood used to make it was very hard to manipulate.

Since their 1994 debut at the Dallas Arboretum, in Texas, the big bugs have traveled the country. This year, from April 25 to July 20, visitors to the Morton Arboretum will get their own bug's-eye view into the world of insects and arachnids. They'll also learn interesting facts. Did you know that at any given moment, you're never more than eight feet away from a spider?

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