Thanks, Josephine! I also want to mention that when we had the Hickory Horned Devil (Regal Moth) caterpillars, my friend Dominic there was the only person brave enough to hold one. He turns 13 in January and kids can volunteer at MOSI starting at 14 so I've been telling him that in a year he can be my apprentice. I could use a teenager full of energy to carry stuff and lift heavy things for me! I did warn him though that when you volunteer, you don't get to take the caterpillars home with you.
And that usually, it works the other way around and we bring our extras from home to the museum.
A lot of teenagers volunteer at MOSI to get their service hours in. Either for the International Baccalaureate program (which I graduated from), the Bright Futures Scholarship program (which is a thing through the state of Florida where you get free tuition if you meet GPA and SAT guidelines), and I think even the Advanced Placement program has some kind of volunteer requirement. But I think Dominic might actually be a budding lepidopterist. He's been visiting me since he was about eight years old! And I think we all know that for a kid to be interested in anything for that long is very unique. I told him he could get a Bright Futures scholarship and go to UF for free where they have the McGuire Center for lepidoptera study. He told me he had one of those pre-paid college funds and I told him he could use that for grad school.
He says his mom wants him to be a lawyer but I gave him the talk about following your own passions, not your parents, because he's the one who has to live his life. Naturally, I said this when his father wasn't around.
Mentoring is fun! Plus, my therapist says this is all good for me.
I get a lot of parents telling me their kid is a budding zoologist. I haven't met any budding entomologists or lepidopterists, oddly enough. And I'm totally supportive but the fact is, most kids have no idea what that actually entails. And I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, but any time you work with animals or nature, you face death, predation, parasites, disease, etc. My boss has had to let volunteers go because they weren't able to put down butterflies that came out of the chrysalis messed up or were diseased. Dominic has raised many caterpillars so he's had to do that himself so I know he's already used to dealing with the down side of raising insects. Not to mention he has no delusions about the "magical" nature of raising butterflies. My Imperial Moth cat pooped a few times today and I love showing people that this job is not glamorous. It can be very rewarding, but it also involves an awful lot of cleaning. I even got to talk today about how caterpillars will throw up on you as a defense mechanism. MOSI's mission statement is "making science real" and I am out there keeping it real every Sunday. Okay, that kind of turned into a little bit of a rant. Sorry about that! Rant over.
