Asian Long-Horned Beetle

LiLi likes to collect bugs and keep them for a few days in her bug viewer. We like to show her lǎoshī (teacher) our latest catches, largely because she thinks we're crazy and often tells us something about the bugs to be concerned about - like the caterpillar will give you a rash.  So when we caught this huge (4 inches from antennae to end) Asian Long-Horned Beetle, we were interested to see her reaction.

When Lin Cai saw the beetle she excitedly pointed at it and said, "chī tóufǎ" - which means "eats hair."  Noticing Vicki's baffled look (Mark was already at work) - not because she didn't understand the Mandarin but because she only knew this beetle to be an alarming invasive beetle in the U.S. that destroys hardwood trees - Lin Cai runs to Vicki's hairbrush, takes a hair from it, opens the bug viewer and grabs this big beetle by its antennas and starts feeding it the hair!  It was certainly the most unpredictable reaction to any of our bugs...

Since Mark didn't get to see this amazing spectacle, we asked her to do it again a couple days later.  This is the video from then.  The other little blonde kid in the video is our neighbor's kid Christian, who is 18 months old.  The woman holding LiLi for much of the video is Guang Cai, another lǎoshī.  Lin Cai and Guang Cai team teach LiLi and Christian for 20 hours a week.