Press Release

3D models of the Mosquito, Leech, and Black Fly will be featured in the Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches exhibition opening at Field Museum on Oct. 27. © Royal Ontario Museum, 2020

Natural and supernatural bloodfeeding creatures will take center stage in the Field Museum’s newest exhibition Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches. Featuring immersive experiences, larger-than-life installations, and interactive elements, Bloodsuckers gives visitors a glimpse of the diversity, evolution, and interconnected world of nature’s vampires – and the myths, legends, and pop culture they have inspired.

The exhibition will open on Oct. 27.

“There are so many opportunities in the exhibition to get a good look at creatures that you would normally run away from,” said Marie Georg, Senior Exhibition Developer at the Field. “From leech models, to live ticks safely contained in an aquarium, to an audio experience ‘immersing’ yourself in a cloud of mosquitoes, there’s a lot of content that you can savor and learn from without worrying about being bitten.”  

In addition to media and touchable 3D models, the exhibition will feature live animals, including Yellow Fever mosquitoes, American dog ticks, European medicinal leeches, local leeches, and sea lampreys.  

Organized by the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto, Canada, Bloodsuckers was co-curated by Dr. Doug Currie (ROM Vice-President, Department of Natural History and Senior Curator of Entomology) and Dr. Sebastian Kvist (formerly ROM Curator of Invertebrates and now Director of Collections and Research at the Swedish Museum of Natural History) and features more than 70 specimens and 140 objects from ROM's collection. 

Specimens from the Field’s collection will highlight a bloodfeeding insect that people may not know much about: the horse fly.

“There are 4,500 different species of horse fly in the world,” said Maureen Turcatel, PhD, Gantz Family Collections Center Insects Collections Manager and exhibition curator. “We are trying to understand how they became so diversified and how the species are related to each other.” The exhibition will highlight Turcatel’s expeditions to collect horse flies from North America, South America, and Africa.

Turcatel added that Bloodsuckers offers community scientists who are inclined to track real bloodfeeding parasites the chance to do so by signing up with the Terrestrial Parasite Tracker (TPT) project, a National Science Foundation grant-funded project active across 22 American museums, universities, and research collections, with the goal of digitizing over 1.2 million specimens. 

Opening Weekend Events Highlight Blood Donation, Offers Free Tickets to Show

As part of opening weekend, exhibition sponsor Abbott will partner with Versiti Blood Centers to host a blood drive at Field Museum on Friday, Oct. 27 and Saturday, Oct. 28. 

Each person who donates blood will receive four free admission tickets to the museum and the exhibition. To register for the opening weekend blood drive and future blood drives at the museum, visit bethe1donor.com/bloodsuckers  

Field Museum Major Sponsors for Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches: Abbott
and Magellan Corporation