Now, 11-year-old Spencer is the author of the picture book The Bug Girl. It's the true story of how her love of insects has affected her short life in big — and sometimes difficult — ways.

In essence, the book is an extended meditation on a question that Sverdrup-Thygeson, an entomologist at Norway’s University of Life Sciences, gets asked all the time: What good are bugs anyway?

It's a 400-acre facility. I asked the curator if any of the artifacts had any bugs on them, or if they had conducted a butterfly survey at the facility. She kind of looked stunned and said ...

"I was kind of a bug kid. We would catch little creatures and keep them in matchboxes," Hoekstra said. When Hoekstra moved to Iowa, she began raising butterflies ... wrote a book to teach those ...