Bug Underbellies

The segmented bodies of bugs, especially the underbellies, have always made me a bit squeamish, even when I caught them as a child and put them in my bug catcher for a few hours to look at with a microscope.

The feeling had not diminished by the time I sat in my eighth-grade biology class staring at the 4-inch-long, raised for the purpose, long-dead, preserved in formaldehyde, brown grasshopper in a tray next to a scalpel sitting on my desk. I might have missed the grade for that activity except for my student partner — he used the scalpel. I made drawings and wrote the paper. Poor grasshopper; this is how we learn what those spiracles for respiration look like.

When I told my illustrator, Trena Brannon, “I want like bugs sitting in the stands watching the Roly-Poly Rally Race,” I was not thinking about bug underbellies. My initial knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of them was shock, complete with goose bumps. But, oh my! The little faces she gave them!

Bug racing fans!

I am a fan of the bug fans in my children’s read-aloud picture book, Oblee Ollie Olee’s Roly-Poly Rally Race.

If bug underbellies make you squeamish, I hope this adorable image helps you recover.