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‘Exhibition of Love — A Romance between Plants and Insects’

  • Date:2018-12-25
‘Exhibition of Love — A Romance between Plants and Insects’

You might think that we humans are the masters of the Earth, but did you know that there are some one quintillion insects living on the globe with us? That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 125 million times more insects than people. In fact, as many as 75% of the known animal species on the planet are insects! It would hardly be an exaggeration to say we live on a "planet of the insects."

 

In cooperation with the National Taiwan University Museums, the NTU Insect Museum, and the NTU Department of Entomology, the National Taiwan Museum will hold a special exhibition titled "Exhibition of Love — A Romance between Plants and Insects" from Dec. 25, 2018 to Sept. 1, 2019.

 

Through the combination of a wealth of written and graphic information, insect and flora samples, and virtual-reality scenes with beautiful romantic settings, the exhibition aims to present the wondrous world of competition and cooperation between plants and insects across eight different themed areas.

 

Exhibition curator Tsai Chi-wei (蔡志偉), an associate professor at the NTU Department of Entomology, explains that there is a complex web of interactions between plants and insects. The power of evolution has led to these two distinct groups to develop an extremely close, interdependent relationship with each other. Sometimes the insects will feed on the plants, and sometimes, in a few special cases, the plants will lure in and digest the insects.

 

On top of this, flowering plants rely on insects to assist with the spreading of pollen or seeds, rewarding those insects with food, nectar, or even places to live. It is truly something worthy of investigating and understanding.

 

NTM Director Hung Shih-you (洪世佑) remarked that while the NTM and the NTU Museums entered into a formal exchange and alliance agreement in 2015, even as far back as their original forms as the Taiwan Governor-General's Museum and Taihoku Imperial University, respectively, the two have enjoyed an excellent cooperative relationship characterized by the sharing of resources, research, collections, and exhibitions.

 

Hung also emphasized that the museums of today can no longer afford to simply sit and wait for visitors, but rather need to actively reach out to the community to form alliances and bring a wealth of academic and cultural resources to the public in lively, engaging ways.

 

 

‘Exhibition of Love — A Romance between Plants and Insects’