STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

If there was an Insect Olympics, you’d find cockroaches holding their breath for 40 minutes and grasshoppers using their large hind legs to jump three feet.

Fleas, meanwhile, would showcase how they can jump a hundred times their body length which, for many youngsters, would be like jumping across one or two football fields. But, instead of using their hind legs, they jump via a resilin pad that acts like a coiled spring that releases and propels them off the ground.

You can learn about these superpowers of insects and arachnids in today’s Bug Zoo Festival at the Sawtooth Botanical Garden.

The annual Festival will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. today—Saturday, May 16--at the public garden south of Ketchum at Highway 75 and Gimlet Road. There’ll be interactive exhibits, live critters for youngsters to hold and face painting. Attendees will be invited to adopt a puppy dressed as a bug with Mountain Humane and nosh on food for sale.

Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for youth 3 to 18. It’s free for those 3 and younger.

This year’s festival is focusing on superpowers or adaptations—special qualities that bugs and other critters develop to help them survive, said Megan Schooley, the SBG’s community engagement coordinator.

Bees’ superpower, for instance, is their eyesight, which allows them to see patterns in flowers that are invisible to humans but show the bees where the nectar is.

“A lot of adaptations are about movement. A butterfly, for instance, needs to fly to find nectar and lay eggs. And while many spiders catch prey in their webs, crab spiders surprise prey by jumping out at them,” said Schooley.

Ants build tunnels in which to lay eggs by moving dirt with their powerful jaws one grain at a time to the surface where the ant hill serves as the entrance.

Billions of ants in a gigantic super colony in Europe have dug a tunnel that stretches for 3,700 miles. That’s as long as if you walked from the Wood River Valley to Los Angeles and back home twice, according to Schooley.

Some ant tunnels are only a few inches deep, but others measure 25 feet deep.

Spiders weave their webs from silk, spinning it with silk-spinning organs on their abdomen called spinnerets. There are many types of webs, including funnels, tangles, sheets and orbs.

Spider silk is five times stronger for its size than a steel beam. Spiders coat some of their silk with sticky stuff to catch prey while leaving other strands free of sticky stuff so they can move around easier.

Schooley says she comes up with ideas for the Bug Festival by thinking about the questions kids ask.

“They’re so curious and they love to see things through the bugs’ eyes. We’ll have a jumping station so they can see how far they can jump. They’ll slither like a snail and crawl like a spider and run like a tiger beetle—fast! And we’ll have a game where they can move different insects around.”

If you were as strong as an ant, Schooley noted, you could lift a car, carry a refrigerator on your back, jump over your house and throw a basketball as far as a rocket ship flies. By the numbers, you could lift 2,000 pounds if you weigh 100 pounds.

Schooley said learning about insects and other critters right under our feet stokes children’s curiosity about the world we live in.

“They can see ants while walking into a grocery store so it’s very relatable.”