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Kendrick Brinson

Members of The Sun City Squares, a square and round dancing club in Arizona, twirl and do-si-do. Constanza Cortes Rodriguez, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama, noticed that dancing was making her a better scientist. “I could feel myself thinking differently and remembering things better.”

Silkworms draw crowds at the Bug Fair. They aren’t the only live animals for sale: Fairgoers can choose from tarantulas, scorpions—even cockroaches.

At vendor Bob Duff’s booth at the Bug Fair, Sagra beetles, also called frog-legged leaf beetles, go for £6 a pop. Duff offers a variety of beetle species.

Adults dressed as a bee, a butterfly, and a cockroach perform a play for kids at the Bug Fair. Fear of insects can begin early. Their bad reputation has led to paltry funding for the field of entomology.

Royce Cumming—one of dozens of vendors selling preserved insects at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’s Bug Fair in May—displays his personal collection. It includes a goliath beetle, a blue morpho butterfly, and a Polyphemus moth.

Some people even collect preserved bees. Plenty are on show at the Bug Fair.