The Museum of Texas Tech University, founded in 1929 as the West Texas Museum, is a free-admission, multidisciplinary public university museum that serves as a regional attraction for the South Plains and West Texas. It houses six collecting divisions, including Anthropology, Arts, Clothing and Textiles, History, Paleontology, and the Natural Science Research Laboratory, which curates the natural history collections of extant animals. Combined, the museum’s holdings are estimated at a little over 9.5 million objects and specimens. Its exhibit galleries span more than 200,000 square feet, with nine permanent galleries and ten rotating ones. Yet until recently, the Invertebrate Zoology Collection had little presence in public-facing events and was not purposefully integrated into the museum’s exhibits.

That changed in 2023, when the museum and several other public-facing units at Texas Tech were repositioned within the administrative purview of Outreach and Engagement in the Office of the Provost. This restructuring enlarged the scope of museum curators’ responsibilities to offer outreach and engagement opportunities for the Lubbock and West Texas communities. Jennifer C. Girón, curator of the Invertebrate Zoology Collection and a beetle specialist, saw an opening. She coordinated with other museum personnel to develop an in-person event with observation stations and a lecture, leveraging the collection’s large holdings of beetles from around the world, including visually striking specimens partly derived from a large group of confiscated specimens turned over by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the early 2000s.

Defining a theme and date was straightforward. The team took advantage of June Bug Day, a national celebration of biodiversity and wildlife, and the fact that the collection holds a large assortment of beetles, including representatives of the genus Phyllophaga, the so-called typical June bugs of the family Scarabaeidae. The event was designed around three components: two observation stations equipped with insect drawers and stereo microscopes, a station hosted by the Texas Tech Entomology Club featuring live organisms, and a thirty-minute lecture about beetles for a general audience. Planning began about one month in advance with the museum’s office of Marketing and Communications, followed by coordination with the Operations team, which schedules events and auditorium access, and the Exhibits team, which decides on the use of gallery space.

A walk through the museum galleries with the Exhibits manager helped determine the best locations for the three stations, optimizing the flow of people and the lighting conditions. The Marketing and Communications officer created a marketing image to represent the event and began promoting it through the museum’s social media platforms. The specimen drawers were already prepared: one contained showy, large, and colorful butterflies and beetles, while the other was a set of eight unit trays, each holding about twenty specimens representing multiple insect orders and displaying variation in size, shape, and color. For the June beetle drawers, the curator pulled specimens from across the beetle collection, including dung beetles, rhinoceros beetles, stag beetles, hide beetles, weevils, leaf beetles, jewel beetles, darkling beetles, ground beetles, tiger beetles, water beetles, diving beetles, fireflies, and soldier beetles, to display variation in sizes, shapes, and colors.

At each viewing station, at least two student volunteers talked to the public about the specimens and facilitated close-up observation through the available microscopes. Small stepping stools were available for smaller children so they could reach the appropriate height to look through the microscopes. The Texas Tech Entomology Club, an undergraduate student organization, hosted a station with live organisms: a millipede, a hissing cockroach, and a vinegarroon. The millipede and the cockroach were allowed to be handled by the public in a controlled manner, with members of the club supervising and handling the organisms. The accompanying lecture included a brief introduction to June bugs and June Bug Day, followed by a general introduction to how to recognize a beetle and why beetles are important, emphasizing their ecological roles as decomposers, pollinators, predators, and bioindicators, and also addressing the issues beetles can create when they become pests and how other organisms, including some human societies, use beetles as a food source.

The event was come-and-go and lasted three hours, from 2:00 pm until museum closing at 5:00 pm. More than 450 people of all ages walked through the doors and passed by the observation stations, with most, though an unknown number, stopping to interact. Many visitors also went through at least some of the museum galleries before departing. About 60 people attended the beetle lecture, and several questions from the public followed at the end. Based on an online sign-up form to which fewer than 30 people responded, the lecture was originally planned for a small auditorium with a capacity of 50 people. However, the Marketing and Communications manager suggested using the larger main auditorium because summer events tend to attract more people, particularly families with children, and she noted the positive public reaction to the social media posts about the event. The Operations team facilitated the move and provided assistance in the auditorium, managing equipment and adjusting lighting and sound. The Exhibits team placed tables with extension cords and stepping stools as needed, and entrance guards provided attendance counts at the conclusion of the event.

The experience revealed both strengths and gaps. The student volunteers were able to talk about the specimens and assist attendees who wanted to observe them under the stereo microscopes, but they were only briefly introduced to the specimens shortly before the start of the event. For future iterations, the team plans to have written support available so that volunteers can prepare ahead of time and refer to documentation as the event progresses. At institutions with active entomology programs, student volunteers tend to have a general understanding of insect diversity and the ability to recognize different beetle groups with enough background to talk about them confidently during brief interactions. Because such a program does not exist at Texas Tech, providing background information to volunteers would have improved their ability to effectively communicate the importance of the organisms displayed. The students managing the live organisms station demonstrated that interacting with the public in a controlled setting helps visitors feel more comfortable with live arthropods, and the experience indicates that outreach events are important not only for public learning but for the professional development of students who communicate relevant concepts to the public.

The content shared in the beetle lecture seemed well received by attendees, who represented a broad range of ages, from small children and school-aged children to college students, adults, and seniors. However, there was no system in place to determine whether the lecture succeeded at changing perceptions of beetles from nuisance to necessary and helpful components of the environment. In the past, the museum has used the number of attendees as a metric for how successful an event was; under the new directives of Outreach and Engagement, the institution is moving toward more engaging interactions with the community that go beyond the mere provision of information. Although there are resources available on how to tackle outreach events, a lack of experience and guidance resulted in no data or feedback being gathered that could have been helpful in making adjustments to subsequent iterations of the event. There is currently work taking place at Texas Tech Outreach and Engagement to train personnel, including curators with strong backgrounds in their specific disciplines but less experience engaging with the public, on topics such as how to establish effective community partnerships and how to plan for more meaningful bidirectional interactions that can actually change people’s perception and behavior in the long run.

The lessons from Come Bug Me extend well beyond Lubbock. The team recommends planning strategically, since success measured only by attendance cannot gauge whether organizing such an event is worth the effort beyond having people come through the doors. They recommend coordinating effectively, because multiple eyes and experiences can optimize both the work to put together the event and the experience guests get from it, and planning ahead allows plenty of time to adjust as necessary. They recommend creating documentation for volunteers, since one person cannot be everywhere at once and student volunteers are fundamental to the success of such events, which requires specimen displays and associated information to be ready in advance to allow time for volunteers to become familiar with the material. Finally, they recommend documenting the event from scheduling to execution and assessment, including delegating the task of capturing images during the event, as these images can serve as support when requesting space for future events and promoting the institution through marketing. As the first attempt by the Invertebrate Zoology Collection to organize and conduct an outreach event, Come Bug Me turned a research collection into a public attraction and set a template that other institutions caring for biological collections used primarily for research can adapt for their own communities.

Subject of Research: science communication

Article Title: Come Bug Me: the first attempt at an outreach event showcasing the Invertebrate Zoology Collection of the Museum of Texas Tech University

Article References: Girón, J. C. (2025). Come Bug Me: the first attempt at an outreach event showcasing the Invertebrate Zoology Collection of the Museum of Texas Tech University. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.153552

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.153552

Keywords: Come, first, attempt, outreach, event, showcasing, Invertebrate, Zoology, Collection, Museum, Texas, Tech