Insectarium getting fewer visitors than predicted

Three years after it opened, the largest freestanding bug museum in the United States is getting fewer visitors than predicted. But Audubon Insectarium officials say visitors get a great experience. The New Orleans museum drew 141,000 visitors for the seven months it was open in 2008, 247,000 in 2009 and 215,000 last year. Those figures are considerably lower than the annual projection, made after Hurricane Katrina, of 300,000 to 350,000 visitors a year, let alone the 428,000 a year envisioned in a study years before its opening. Still, museum officials say they are more than satisfied with what they have created. “I feel like we already overdeliver on the visitor experience,” says entomologist Jayme Necaise, director of animal and visitor programs at the 23,000-square-foot, $25 million museum devoted to explaining the history, life stories, economic importance and occasional threats to humans of insects—creatures that represent nearly 90% of all the animals on Earth and outnumber humans more than a million to one. And, indeed, there’s wide-eyed wonder on the faces of children and adults confronted with white-eyed assassin bugs, Texas leafcutter ants or metallic frog beetles, not to mention a two-inch-long horsefly or a 3.25-inch giant burrowing cockroach. The Audubon Nature Institute’s 2011 budget projected the insectarium would lose $84,000 this year, down sharply from $408,000 in 2010. Like the Audubon Zoo and Audubon Park, it relies on money from the institute’s “cash cow,” the Aquarium of the Americas, to break even.