Costa Rica Receives Donation of World's Largest Bug Collections

Costa Rica Donation

Richard Whitten and his wife Margaret lived in Monteverde, Costa Rica, for 16 years. This is where he accumulated many bugs to make a up the world's largest bug collection to date. Whitten's favorite piece is the birdwing butterfly of New Guinea, an exquisite and rare butterfly.

He has collected an assortment of arthropods – insects, arachnids, centipedes and other types of creepy crawlers. You can find walking stick bugs and millipedes the size of one's forearm, beetles the size of a small bird and spiders that look like they could eat a small bird. For example, the aptly named “Goliath bird-eating spider”.

All these creatures – thousands of species – will be donated to the University of Costa Rica's biology department.

“I just grew up loving insects,” Whitten said. “It's a hobby that got out of hand.”

The one hundred boxes of mounted organisms, including scorpions, moths, cockroaches of all shapes and surprisingly gigantic sizes eventually will be housed in a new building on the UCR campus.

The collection will rival some of the world's largest arthropod collections such as the ones found at the Smithsonian and the New York Museum of Natural History. Some of the more exotic creatures on display came from such far-away places as Ghana and Papua New Guinea.

Whitten now lives in Idaho, and he had previously planned to donate the collection to a children's a museum in the United States. Permit issues got in the way, so he decided the UCR was a better option.

The decision thrilled the UCR biology department. Close to 50 students and professors and hundreds of mounted bugs were gathered in a classroom at the UCR on Tuesday to announce the donation. Whitten was floored by the number in attendance for the presentation of the collection.

The university's staff understands the significance of receiving such a massive collection. “The value is in principle,” said Hammer Salazar, who works at the Biological Reserve on UCR's campus. “The value does not serve us in economical terms. The value is for the nature.”

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