Aaron Rodriques has his priorities in order.
When he got off the train at Pennsylvania Station in New York to come home for winter break, coat pockets stuffed with beetles and giant cockroaches, he did not go see his girlfriend on the Upper East Side or his parents in the Bronx. He headed straight for the nearest Petland.
He picked up 10 crickets, 10 waxworms, 13 tobacco hornworms and 15 darkling beetle larvae, known as superworms.
The next day, just before Christmas, Rodriques, 26, sat in his childhood bedroom, surrounded by glass tanks and reflected on his metamorphosis from isolated bug nerd to mini-celebrity and fledgling ambassador for the creepy and crawly, performing regular show-and-tells at art spaces and schools.
“Every major event in my life has been around insects,” he said.
Rodriques sat at his childhood desk with a wide horn hissing cockroach crawling across the front of his shirt and a death’s head cockroach, momentarily forgotten, somewhere on his back. The wide horn is 8.8cm long, with a lustrous, lacquered-wood-looking exoskeleton that appears to be wearing an oversized black frog mask. The bulging “eyes” are his horns.
Rodriques said the insect used them “sort of like a ram would use its horns” to fight other males over territory. “They’re a lot more mammalian than we give them credit for.”
Rodriques wrote his master’s thesis at New York University about hornworms.
“They have an amazing defense where they collect the nicotine found in the tobacco they eat and exhale it as a gas to scare away predators,” but they are also his friends.
“If I’m feeling stressed out, I might take one out and they’ll calm me down,” he said.
Rodriques marks his life by the bugs he has loved. When he was four, he would scoop up pavement ants in front of his house and keep them in jars.
“They looked like a weird combination of robots and aliens,” he said.
When he was seven, Rodriques’ house got infested with German cockroaches, the common household scourge.
“I tried to make them pets,” he said.
Adolescence brought a deeper interest in larvae.
“For me, one of the highlights of high school was staring at mealworms,” he said.
In 2015, he saw on Facebook that a band called Moth Eggs was playing at Bohemian Grove in Brooklyn.
“I posted that I’m going to go because I breed moths and I like their name,” he said.
The woman who programs a space called the Tarot Society saw his post and asked him to do a show, he said.
One thing led to another: More shows, and a social life. He met his first girlfriend when she took a liking to Maximillion, his giant African millipede, as long as a man’s forearm.
He met his second girlfriend when she was looking for someone to wrangle green bottle flies for a music video.
There have been mishaps along the way. At a performance and hands-on session in Brooklyn, an audience member dropped Maximillion. A couple of days later, he began leaking dark fluid and died.
Rodriques said he cried, just as he had when he lost his twig mantis, his pink toe tarantula and Mr Crabs the blue land crab.
On Monday, Rodriques will head back to Purdue University to resume his doctoral research on the seductively sweet tergal secretions of German cockroaches.
“The male secretes it, she eats it, and while she eats it, he’ll mate with her,” he said.
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