Find out what’s eating you – literally – in new exhibit at Exploration Place

The very thought of them causes many people to shriek and shudder. But a traveling exhibit opening Saturday at Exploration Place will take people straight into the bowels – literally – to look at parasites such as tapeworms, leeches, lice, mosquitoes, maggots and ticks.

“Eww! What’s Eating You?” will run through Jan. 4 at the museum at 300 N. McLean Blvd.

The exhibit takes the form of a carnival that rolls into town – in Wichita’s case, just in time for Halloween.

“It’s fun,” exhibit company president John Good of Las Vegas said of the carnival – and of parasites. “You’re attracted to it, but at the same time it’s a little scary.”

And, in the case of the parasite exhibit, at least a little graphic. The exhibit includes an “intestinal” barrel in which children can roll around as in a funhouse, all the while looking straight into a video of a magnified colonoscopy in which ascaris roundworm was found. (Note to those not planning to go into the Colon Crawl: You’ll be looking straight at the wormy video too.)

There is also a booth in which CNN footage of the removal of guinea worm from the skin of afflicted people is shown. You either have the stomach to watch – or you very quickly have to look away.

Real leeches, hanging out in a little aquarium, will be part of the exhibit.

But the exhibit wants people to learn about the parasites not only because they’re morbidly fascinating but because people can take precautions to keep the bugs from hurting their health, said Good. There are lessons about why to cook meat well, wear shoes outside and check hotel rooms for bedbugs (“When you’re fast asleep, they come out to feed on you!”).

Kids love the gross-out factor, said Jan Luth, Exploration Place’s president. They can do fun things such as spin the Wheel of Misfortune, jump to see whether they can make a bell ring as high as a parasite can jump, and walk through a stand of oversized hairs carrying lice.

The exhibit looks at two kinds of parasites: those that live on us and those that live in us, and which of those carry disease.

Their life cycles are “so crazy,” Good said, describing the lengths to which hookworms, for example, go to get into someone’s intestinal tract: entering from animal feces through the sole of a foot, eventually making a person cough, which causes the person to swallow the worms.

Human beings also can be observed doing something interesting as they go through the exhibit, Good said: “Everybody scratches.”

Exploration Place will be offering events and educational programs tied to the exhibit. Among them, on the first weekend, staff members from the Kansas Humane Society will be on hand from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday to talk about how to prepare for bringing home a pet and how to protect pets from parasites.

This story was originally published September 10, 2014 at 10:04 PM with the headline "Find out what’s eating you – literally – in new exhibit at Exploration Place."