NEW YORK >> Jessica Ware, an associate curator for the American Museum of Natural History, waxes rhapsodic about beetles. She thinks cockroaches get a bad rap. Cicadas, well, they’re just beautiful, and she’s proud that the ones that come every 17 years are unique to North America.

But — even though maybe an entomologist shouldn’t play favorites — it is the dragonfly that really makes her heart sing. She wears a dragonfly brooch on her dress. She sports a dragonfly tattoo on her arm.

“They’re like lions of the sky,” she said. “They intercept their prey like lions do. They don’t fly to where the fly is now; they fly to where it will be and cut it off. They’re remarkable predators.”

Ware, 45, who works in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, is the perfect ambassador for insects. She makes people who have never thought about them — except as an annoyance — understand why they’re both fascinating and important.

For Ware, it is a particularly exciting time, as the museum gears up this spring to open its $431 million Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation on New York City’s Upper West Side. Ware has been part of the small team to choose what will go into the new insectarium, the first permanent gallery in the museum dedicated to insects since the 1970s.

Selecting which of approximately 350 representative specimens of more than 20 million insect specimens stored in the museum should be displayed in the insectarium was a brutal choice for the three curators and their assistants.

Ware was in charge of picking insects that go through incomplete metamorphosis, which includes only egg, nymph and adult stages; insects like a butterfly go through complete metamorphosis (egg, larva, pupa and adult). Grasshoppers, cicadas, cockroaches and yes, dragonflies, are all examples of incomplete metamorphosis, also called non-holometabolous.

“It was really tough, because we needed to pick all the non-holometabolous that will be in this giant insectarium forever. Goodness!” she said, recalling the agonizing decisions she had to make. “I remember just looking at all the drawers and thinking: ‘What am I possibly going to pick?’ ”

It took her and her assistant about a year and a half to select the insects.