How Zoe got the bug for insects

Don't tell her daughter but Zoe Simmons isn’t keen on live varieties of spiders.

Not a surprising thing for most of us but a little more so for Zoe, who is responsible for the spider and fly collections at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, and spends her working days happily surrounded by bugs, around seven million of them.

They are not all dead ones and as well dealing with the exhibits, the entomologist also takes part in bug handling events for the public.

“Cockroaches are brilliant for handling and I’m fine with mantis and stick insects,” she says, but it’s an enthusiasm she doesn’t share for tarantulas.

“You have to be 100 per cent confident and I’m not,” she says. “But I’ve got as far as stroking and I’m working my way up to it.”

She believes fear of insects is an aquired behaviour (“I think I probably learnt it from my dad”) and she’s determined not to pass that on to her two-year-old daughter Audrey or the young visitors to the museum.

What she does want to share is her passion for the insect world and a job she loves.

Always interested in making collections and figuring out what things were, it wasn’t until Zoe was studying Environmental Biology (Ecology) at Brookes University that her interest in insects was sparked.

“I had to put together a small collection of identified insects (I chose weevils) which led me to visit the Entomology Department at the Natural History Museum in London,” she recalls.

“One of the curators there let me have a key, told me to look through the collections and I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole.

“I remember pulling out one drawer that had a small metallic pink beetle in it (I think it might have been Rhynchites pubescens but I forget the specifics now) and pretty much deciding on the spot that this is what I wanted to do in life – study insects.

“Every drawer had some new marvel in it and I must have spent hours looking through the collections.”

She’s now a member of collections staff within the Life Department at the museum working within the Entomology collections with direct responsibility for the Diptera (fly) and Arachnida (spiders and related orders) collections as well as duties involving other parts of the collections.

It’s a job she clearly adores and her enthusiasm for both what she does and the desire to share the knowledge with visitors to the museum shines through.

“I look after the collections on a day-to-day basis, facilitate visitors, issue loans of material to various places around the world, deal with enquiries both general and specific amongst many other things,” she says. “I trained as a coleopterist [beetle expert] in the first instance but have since diversified and been able to apply my skills to other groups.

“One of the things that I love about my job is that the work is so varied: I might be doing a live bug-handling session for the public, training up a volunteer or supervising an intern project, researching the collections in the archives, moving jars of spiders around in the spirit store, re-curating a historic Diptera collection, identifying insects for enquires or giving tours of the collections for interested parties. It certainly keeps me busy but I find it immensely satisfying.”

Once Zoe’s interest in insects had been sparked, she started volunteering at the entomology department in the museum on Parks Road.

“I realised that I have a passion for museums as well,” says the 33-year-old, who lives in Cowley.

“As it happens museum work is rather a natural fit for me and I was very lucky to have some excellent mentors in the form of the department staff who encouraged me horribly in any way possible.

“From volunteering I went to working in the department on short term contracts and I have gently progressed my way up the ladder since then to the position that I am in now.”

Her career path has involved involved “a lot of hard work, persistence and a large element of luck”.

Zoe explains: “A more traditional career path would nowadays involve going along the academic route of a Master’s and potentially a PhD whilst working in museum or undertaking traineeships.

“As it was, fortune favoured me as a position become available after my then boss, George McGavin retired from the museum to pursue a television career.”

Dr McGavin, who has several insect species named in his honour, has gone on to present many natural history programmes including Monkey Planet which aired on BBC1 in April. He also enjoys eating insects, which he describes as flying prawns, but that’s a “pleasure” Zoe is happy to forego. “I have been offered, and they are good for you, but I haven’t eaten any insects,” she says.

But she would love to discover a new species and have one named after her (“that’s absolute ego on my part”) and, for the future, Zoe’s aim is to run a department within life sciences at the museum.

“I think my first love is always going to be natural history so I can’t see myself leaving that area even if I do have to diversify out of working with entomological collections,” she says. “In an ideal world of course it would be beetles all day, every day.”

As for spiders at home, Zoe is careful to show no fear of the domestic variety in front of her daughter. “If the husband is around however, I’m am more than happy to delegate the spider removal to him,” she says. “He’s pretty good at it and will actually pick them up and let Audrey get a proper look at them.”