Any given day will end up being the worst day of someone’s life. It might not be me, you or anyone you know, but rest assured every single day is somebody’s worst. Now, for most of us, August 22nd, 2018, was a day like any other. Maybe you went out to eat or laid in bed all day like I did, but for John Cambridge, the CEO of Philadelphia’s Insectarium and for insect enthusiasts around the world—it was the worst day they’ve had in awhile.
The day started normally, the clock struck 9:00a.m. and the Insectarium employees scheduled for that day showed up, opened the doors and slowly but surely members of the general public began filing in. Nothing was out of the ordinary—at least not at first.
Around lunchtime, things began to change. Two of the employees began removing insects from their displays, placing them in plastic containers and loading them into a black escalade. Now, this isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary as the insects are often moved from their displays for any number of reasons. The strange thing was how many insects were being moved. It started off slow like a trickle, a roach here and a butterfly there. Before long, it was a rushing river of creepy crawlies running right out the back door.
The first to go were the giant African mantises, all twelve of them gone: some green and some brown, but all of them devout in nature. Then the bumblebee millipedes, about four thousand legs between them all, with a multitude of bright yellow bands wrapping each of their backs like gold bracelets. Then came the roaches, lots of roaches. And if you’ve ever been to the Philadelphia Insectarium, then you know when I say “a lot,” I mean tens of thousands of roaches. Whole colonies gone. The bathroom and kitchen displays once covered with a literal sea of brown exoskeletons—all gone. Then came the tarantulas, with their fur coats and, in the case of the Mexican Fireleg, their blood red legs. And finally, the six eyed sand spider, a spider that often attracted huge crowds for its habit of burying itself in the sand that lined its display. The six-eyed sand spider is one of the most deadly in the entire world, with a bite that contains enough venom to rot 25 percent of a person’s body in mere minutes. And the six-eyed spider could only watch, six times over, as a gloved hand entered the display and scooped it up as if it was nothing but a household pest.
And just like that, the most deadly spider in the world was gone. Along with over 7,000 other insects and arachnids, worth about 41,000 dollars, all gone. All our perpetrators left behind were two blue Insectarium uniforms pinned to the wall of the backroom with a butcher knife and one Mexican Fireleg Tarantula found crawling around the office of the Insectarium’s own John Cambridge.