In Audubon Insectarium you can watch Formosan termites through a wooden skyline of the city or stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet swarming with giant cockroaches and watch dung beetles plow their way through a mound of waste.

After that you can engage in the museum’s most brilliant interactivity by joining in the line of eager visitors prepared to munch on a handful of crunchy “Cajun fried crickets” or scoop up some wax-worm stir fry.

The Insectarium’s butterfly room. Every animal seen at the 23,000-square-foot Insectarium — from a mounted 19-inch-long stick insect from the Malay Peninsula to a live black atlas beetle that crawls inside a transparent table in the museum café.

Bugs seem extraordinary vulnerable — a footstep can kill hundreds of ants — and astoundingly resilient.

The Insectarium is an unusual tribute, because the double visions of respect and fear, amazement and shock, fascination and disgust, are woven throughout the exhibits, indeed, throughout human encounters with these creatures.