Fairgoers bitten by Bug-Ology exhibit

Friday was Olivia Barrier’s birthday, but there wasn’t any cake in sight. Instead, the La Center 7-year-old munched on something that shocked even her mom: a cricket.

“She can be picky,” Lisa Barrier, Olivia’s mother, said. “Some days she loves pizza and other days she doesn’t want to touch it. So I was shocked she ate the bug.”

The bug came from a cricket farm, and was one of a few tasty insects available to guests at the Bug-Ology exhibit at the Clark County Fair. The exhibit features live bugs on display, gigantic animatronic bugs and a butterfly tent. It runs through the close of the fair on Sunday.

The insects were brought to the fair by Pacific Animal Productions. The company, based in Fallbrook, Calif., offers animals and educational displays to fairs, schools and libraries around the West Coast. Handlers from Pacific are hosting multiple shows a day at the fair where guests can get close to spiders, millipedes and walking sticks, or even, in Olivia’s case, taste a cricket.

Olivia was one of a few kids picked at the Friday afternoon show for the honor — or horror — of tasting a cricket.

“At first it was crunchy,” she said. “Then it just tasted like barbecue sauce.”

Afterward, Olivia scrunched up her face and spent a few seconds trying to literally wipe the taste off her tongue. She said she doesn’t plan to eat any more bugs.

“I try to get people to taste the hotter ones, because the heat masks the bug taste more,” said Taylor Drummond, 21, of Colorado, who was one of the insect wranglers working the Bug-Ology exhibit Friday.

The company had 12 flavors of crickets on display, from barbecue to cotton candy to Indian curry. Drummond said his favorite is the jalapeno garlic. The wasabi-flavored cricket was mostly crunchy, with some wasabi-tinged heat that stuck around a bit after eating the cricket.

“They’re a pretty healthy snack,” Drummond said. “They have some protein, too.”

The fair is no stranger to animal-themed food, but crickets are certainly a harder sell than elephant ears, hot dogs or turkey legs. One mom told her daughter she’d give her $1 to try a cricket, but the young girl couldn’t be bought. She refused by covering her mouth and shaking her head.

While the Bug Bar wasn’t drawing a hungry horde Friday afternoon, there was plenty of eating going on in the butterfly tent, where visitors could pay $2 to go in the tent and feed flowers to butterflies.

Jazmine Reardon, 9, of La Center said that was her favorite part of the exhibit.

“They were pretty,” she said. “The other ones are gross.”

Not everyone agreed, though. When Drummond took some of the kinder bugs from their display cases, a few kids rushed him to see them up close and even worked up the courage to hold some. Harry, a Chilean rose hair tarantula, climbed around the hands of a few guests on Friday. An unnamed vinegaroon couldn’t be trusted with guests, as he sprayed a vinegar-smelling substance on Drummond a few times earlier in the week. Drummond said that’s a defense mechanism for the bug, which is a member of the scorpion family.

Drummond said the exhibit was as much about educating people on bugs as trying to dispel fears of certain insects.

“We don’t want people to be afraid of spiders,” he said. “If we get rid of all spiders, there would be 50 percent more mosquitoes in the world, and they carry a lot of diseases.”