Logan Ramsey
News Editor
The Idaho Museum of Natural History has brought a part of the unseen world around us to life with its new exhibit called Out of the Shadows.
The exhibit opened on Jan. 18 and it’s too early to report numbers, but Amber Tews, Collections Manager, observed an engaged audience on Saturday.
“We really wanted people to gain an appreciation for the world around them, especially the part that you don’t see,” said Tews.
The exhibit features information on snakes, owls, and bats, but exhibit-goers will be hard pressed to not notice the giant-sized Wolf Spider.
The spider, poised over and about to devour a Yellow Jacket is just one of four other displays that were 3-D printed in-house by the Idaho Virtualization Lab. The exhibit features a Jerusalem Cricket, tick, mosquitto, and Demodex Facemites, built by some full-time staff and Idaho State University CPI students.
Jesse Pruitt, Manager of the Idaho Virtualization Lab, designed the Wolf Spider. The project took about a month and a half of printing and finish work.
Pruitt started by doing his research. He looked at photos of the spider from as many angles as he could find and then used scanning electron microscope imagery for close-ups.
From there, he used Z brush and his reference photos to digitally sculpt the spider. Then it was time to print.
The display is large enough that all the legs had to be printed separately. The body was done in four pieces, and the eyes had to be printed individually, making it a total of about 20 pieces.
The Yellow Jacket was designed by Evelyn, a CPI student. The body took three pieces, and four legs were printed separately.
Another display by Evelyn is the Jerusalem Cricket, and she had to use a slightly different process for printing. She used Fused Deposition Modelling, a method where the plastic is laid down layer by layer, and a higher resolution is achieved if the designer takes the extra time it requires.
The mosquito was created by LCD printing, a resin printing process, that uses LCD screens and UV lights that allow the designer to print with higher detail. Viewers will observe a translucent blood bag made out of red resin on the highly-detailed display.
The Rocky Mountain Tick display sits on a paper mache blade of grass, just as you would see if you were scaled-down to insect size. The tick was done in two pieces, with back legs that face downward and front legs facing upward, split right between those two.
The Demodex Facemites feature a video next to the display that educates viewers on their place in our lives and on our faces.
“We all have these Facemites and it seems gross but at the same time I think it’s cool that we all have our own microenvironment,” Tews said. “You’re never going to get rid of them and if you do it might not be the greatest thing.”
Pruitt and Timothy Gomes, Idaho Virtualization Laboratory Tech Specialist, designed the Facemites, but the Yellow Jacket, Rocky Mountain Tick, Mosquitto, and Jerusalem cricket were done by students.
“It’s given the students the opportunity to learn this process,” Pruitt said.
All of the pieces started out as smooth plastic and had to be sanded down and painted, but there was an extra step for the Wolf Spider. The behemoth arachnid is covered in hair, or what looks like it. It’s actually scenery grass like a designer would use for model trains, and all of it had to be hand placed.
“The ability to do all of this in house is just a boon for us,” said Pruitt.
He doesn’t know how much the displays would cost the museum if they were designed commercially, but he imagines that the Wolf Spider and Yellow Jacket display would cost over $20,000.
Pruitt also feels that the scaled displays brings the creatures to life in a way that photography couldn’t.
“Looking at a picture of a tick only connects you to it so much but being in the same space as something like that … you can see it in three dimensions and walk around it and connect with it better,” Pruitt said.
The exhibit also features interactive displays like Roll-a-Critter and a dark room with animals that go bump in the night.
“I think there’s a little bit of everything for everyone,” Tews said.
Pruitt said that most of their improvements in future exhibits will come in finishing work. Painting was a new process for them, and he even observes improvements in their later displays from the ones they started on.
“This is an exhibit that shows what we’re capable of as a small museum when we come together,” Pruitt said.
