Our Global Bug Man

Ruud Kleinpaste’s insect know-how made him a household name in New Zealand. But the ebullient ‘bug man’ has left the suburbs way behind. Now he’s famous worldwide for a TV series that celebrates some of the planet’s strangest critters.

Story: Lynne Loates

Plenty magazine: Winter 2006

Ruud Kleinpaste has been to lots of places lately. ‘Malaysia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Alaska, Namibia, Madagascar, the whole of the USA, Panama, Venezuela...’ He scrubs at his face as he tries to keep reeling them off.. ‘That’s just the first nine – I can’t even remember the rest.’

It took 42 weeks on the go to shoot Buggin’ with Ruud, a 13-part series on the world’s weirdest insects, with occasional six-day respite trips home. The show aired, to great acclaim, in the United States in 2005 and has been running on Animal Planet in New Zealand in the last few months.

How did the gregarious guy from Meadowbank, Auckland end up being famous? After all, he grew up in Holland as a very shy boy – ‘I was a nerdy sort of bird-watching kid with horn-rimmed glasses.’ Television wasn’t in his game plan. ‘But having said that I know every broadcast that David Attenborough ever did. He had the job I would like to do. He’s still my hero. Wonderful, wonderful.’

Now 54 – ‘a year closer to death,’ he quips – he’s as happy as a middle-aged guy can be. ‘I never thought anyone would offer me this at my age,’ he says. And he’s keen to keep on doing it for a good long time yet. ‘You can’t retire! This is not a job I’m doing. God, I don’t know what it is. It’s in my body, it’s in my bones. You will never retire from what you love.’

Kleinpaste turns down few challenges. When he talks about his travels he’s excited and garrulous and grinning. He describes with guarded delight wanting – yes, wanting– to be stung by the preposterously large Panamanian bullet ant. The pain from one sting lasts 24 hours and is similar, they say, to the pain of having your hand slammed in a car door. So, why? ‘I needed to know if this ant was a bluffer. Ants are notorious bluffers. They put something in your system that makes you think you are mortally wounded in the hope you’ll leave them alone. This bullet ant was no bluffer. But, no worries. If there’s mileage in it for bugs, I’ll have a go.’

Sky diving is the only challenge he has firmly declined. ‘I don’t think it’s natural.’ Funny that. It’s not generally considered natural to relish close relationships with big, bad bugs, yet Ruud Kleinpaste does just that, not because he’s some sort of masochist, but because he believes passionately in the natural worth of all insect life.

Still, it’s not easy to do this sort of Alaska-to-the- Amazon promotion from New Zealand. His escapades were funded by Discovery Channel in Washington DC. And now, like croc expert Steve Irwin and animal expert Jeff Corwin, he’s one of their stars.

Kleinpaste has fans the world over. There’s a nine-year old kid in Florida who advertises his home bug shows in the local paper and charges a 25-cent entry fee. He writes to the Bug Man... ‘I don’t get enough quarters. I wish you could come and give me a hand and then lots more people would come and the Wild Life Department would get a lot more quarters because that’s who I give the money to.’

The boy’s zeal appeals to Kleinpaste. Anyone who loves bugs that much is bound to go far, he reckons, because the planet’s future is going to be dependent on advances in bio-diversity. Example: ‘Take the vicious Australian bull ant. Nasty, nasty. But its coat is covered with the most beautiful antibiotic which, by the way, is now being patented,’ says Kleinpaste, pink with passion.

He says global warming is nothing compared with the need to maintain bio-diversity. ‘If we let things go extinct because we don’t look after their habitats then we’re in real trouble. Who’d have believed that in the tarantula’s spit is a material that can stop people having heart attacks?

They have just discovered this. And if that tarantula had gone extinct we’d never have known.

‘Where do we get the latest antibiotic from? From the backs of cockroaches. Because they live in dirty conditions they have to protect themselves.’

He also flies the flag for soil fertility, which depends on bugs recycling nutrients. ‘If we lose that, we can’t grow our food. If we lose that, forests can’t regenerate and all our endangered species won’t have a habitat at all.’

Meanwhile, there’s a home life he also relishes. When Plenty called he was about to do the vacuuming before his wife, Julie, came home from her teaching job. ‘I have so much admiration for her,’ he says. ‘Teachers have an enormous workload.’ Out back of their house there’s a big sloping lawn it takes him an hour and a half to mow, and a lush vegetable garden. He doesn’t let arthritis in one shoulder keep him off the tennis court, either.

Kleinpaste started out as a field worker with an honours degree in silviculture, animal ecology and conservation and considers himself a ‘general natural historian and biologist with a massive interest in birds’.

His bug interest grew from hearing the question, ‘What good do they do?’ Being curious, he set about finding out.

His small-screen career is so long that he can’t quite remember where it started. ‘A kid’s show on TV3, Wild Track or Early Birds?’ From those small beginnings he’s grown to guest status on US comedian Jay Leno’s massive late-night TV show and has been told he is welcome to appear again any time he’s in Los Angeles.

He does, however, have vivid recall of his first day on radio. It was 23 February 1987, the day Julie was in the labour ward, the day his son Tristan was born. Dad was on ZB radio, being interrogated by Leighton Smith.

‘Know anything about crabs?’ Smith asked, out of the blue. ‘The sort you find on the beach?’ replied Ruud, hopefully. It wasn’t. So Ruud Kleinpaste’s first radio show, 19 years ago, was an unplanned exposé of pubic lice. It launched him into a career that would make him one of our most recognised Kiwis. He says Animal Planet is ‘quite keen’ to make a new show and Kleinpaste’s colleagues from Natural History New Zealand (Dunedin’s respected wildlife film unit) have been in Washington recently discussing further global adventures.

Buggin’ With Ruud recently won a silver medal at a New York media festival. When the satellite phone call came through, Kleinpaste was waist-deep in a piranha infested rivers. ‘The thrill of the win was just a little diluted,’ he says, understatedly for once.

Reprinted by permission. Copyright 2007 Plenty magazine Winter 2006 published for Hanover Group. Subscribe to Plenty today.

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