STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
Gloria Hillard reports.
GLORIA HILLARD: On the edge of this industrial warehouse neighborhood of Los Angeles, is a block-long street lined with small houses. In the middle of the block, a graying wood plank sign advertises Bait & Tackle. Another hand painted sign welcomes newcomers to Worm City, population 90 million. It's an old sign. The town has grown.
FRED RHYME: I keep 120 million worms on hand all the time to ship about 25,000 square feet of worms.
HILLARD: In a baseball hat, Hawaiian shirt and tennis shoes, Worm City's unofficial mayor, Fred Rhyme, is giving me a tour of his makeshift town. He's pointing out the tan cottages that are home to his worms, and I'm thinking, at least they're quiet neighbors.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RHYME: I do raise crickets too.
HILLARD: And the Madagascar hissing cockroaches, more on those popular reptile treats later because for Fred Rhyme, it all began with worms.
RHYME: I grew up in Minnesota and I used to go behind a farmer when he (unintelligible) fields, behind the plow and pick up the worms. And I'd take them and sell them to a fishing tackle store.
HILLARD: Fred shows me a huge plastic tray with thousands of the wiggly caramel-colored mealworms, his super worms, as he likes to call them. They're raised on whole wheat and cactus. Fred scoops up two handfuls.
RHYME: I like to play with them. I always have ever since a little kid I like worms.
HILLARD: Moving outside and down the block, I hear a familiar chirping.
RHYME: All these buildings here are in crickets. I'll show you one of them.
HILLARD: In large troughs, tens of thousands of crickets crawl through what looks like a colony of egg carton. Next door is home to thousands of hissing Madagascar cockroaches who seem to be pretty quiet right now. At adult stage, they're about two inches long with black legs and amber-colored bodies. To get them to hiss you have to rub their stomachs. They kind of sound like aerosol spray cans.
(SOUNDBITE OF COCKROACH HISSING)
HILLARD: Fred runs the business with his wife, Betty, who prefers sitting in the main office behind the desk.
BETTY RHYME: I love them but I don't go near them.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HILLARD: Fred's here six days a week. It keeps him young he says. And I asked him how he came up with the name Rainbow Mealworms for his business...
RHYME: Well, when I was a little kid, my mother always told me there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so I used to get on my bicycle with a shovel and go try and get to the end of the rainbow and I'd dig and never no gold.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HILLARD: But he did find worms.
RHYME: You're right. I never thought of it that way.
HILLARD: For NPR News, I'm Gloria Hillard.