Colorful New Orleans duo hits the swamps after dark to pluck out bugs for Audubon Insectarium's displays

By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, The Times-Picayune , New Orleans Metro Real Time News
on August 24, 2012 at 12:04 AM, updated August 24, 2012 at 10:40 AM

Eight times each summer they ply the wetlands to collect specimens for their exhibits

Whirling above the bug catchers like multicolored snowflakes on a fiercely windy night, the insects swarm toward a large glowing orb in the swamp sky that they mistake for the moon. "Look at that giant moon!" Jayme Necaise imagines the bugs thinking. "I have never been able to get this close to the moon before! Oh, I'm so confused. It's so beautiful!"

About 1 a.m. Tuesday on a 1,700-acre swamp west of Bayou Des Allemands, Necaise and Zack Lemann embraced the onslaught as though it was snow cutting through the August heat. The two New Orleans scientists run the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium on Canal Street, and eight times each summer they ply the wetlands to collect specimens for their exhibits.

To entice the buzzing horde, they construct the artificial celestial body. The 12-foot-tall structure consists of a giant white sheet held taut and sideways by two stands, with a large old-fashioned streetlight affixed atop a crossbeam.

That 1,000-watt mercury vapor lightbulb causes the bugs' internal GPS to go haywire. The insects bounce off the white sheet like popcorn. An observer nearly expects to see words superimposed: Pow! Bam! Wham!

Lemann and Necaise dive to pick up the winged creatures who fall, overwhelmed and disoriented, to the tarp below. Lemann holds the wings of one four-spotted pennant dragonfly in his mouth as he places wet grass in the plastic container that will transport that dragonfly back to Canal Street.

Many insects are attracted to light because for millions of years they used the moon to navigate -- long before humans dotted the sky with artificial light. It confuses the bugs when, suddenly, they arrive at the moon, which typically sits about 240,000 miles away.

Necaise, Lemann and others of similar bug persuasion often go "road running." They drive from one lit-up gas station to the next and collect insects that flock to the glow in rural areas, where the gas station's bulb is the only light. Road running is best on nights such as this past Monday, when the moon is only a sliver in the sky.

"This place is teaming with bugs!" Lemann exclaims in rapture. One bug dives into his mouth. "Hmm. They taste better when you cook them."

Necaise later washes one out of his eye. "I want to draw bugs in from Texas," Necaise muses.

In Necaise's view of the world, insects rule. They break down dead organisms and recycle nutrients back into the environment. "Insects pretty much run the show, and we're just living in it," he says.

The aquatic insects mainly are found in nearby swamps from May to September, and so Lemann and Necaise's goal is to bring back enough bugs to last through the winter.

In the bayou past midnight, the pair walked away with a respectable load that included katydids, fiery searcher beetles, giant water scavenger beetles and predaceous diving beetles.

The fiery searchers, akin to divine Egyptian creatures with their large metallic green wings speckled in gold, secrete a Limburger cheese smell and can actually gas themselves to death if they are left in a container without large enough holes. Necaise opened the top of their container occasionally, "to burp them."

"Smell my finger," Necaise says after handling one.

A bug outing with Lemann and Necaise is a show all its own. The two enjoy bug jokes, with one often playing the straight man and the other the comic. Generally, an explainer must be thrown in, such as, "You have to know about the exoskeleton to get that joke."

Lemann and Necaise also have a hip hop act. Their moniker is the Geeky White Etymologists, or GWEs, and their big hit is a play on a Sir Mix-a-Lot classic -- Baby Got Bug.

When drawn into a more serious discussion, Lemann likens the bug hunt to stocking an art gallery. He wants big, colorful, active insects that work well in groups.

"It's almost like a sculpture or a piece of art. It's about shape, about color and about texture," says Lemann, who once appeared on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

Some of the catch might end up in the Insectarium's Bug Appetite cafe, where visitors can sample crispy Cajun crickets, chocolate chirp cookies, hoppin' herb dip and other delicacies featuring crickets, beetle larvae and other critters.

Lemann himself will dip south Louisiana dragonflies, wings and all, in egg wash and then cook them in Zatarain's seasoned fish fry. He'll perch each fried dragonfly atop a mushroom slice and drizzle it with a bit of Dijon soy butter.

He says they taste like soft-shell crab.


Benjamin Alexander-Bloch can be reached at or 504.826.3321.