Members of the Explorers Club are known for their risk-taking, curiosity, and sense of adventure. They chase tornadoes, walk across continents, and climb the world’s steepest slopes.

But even explorers succumb once a year to one of the more predictable (and comfortable) of life’s experiences: the black-tie fund-raiser. And so it was that more than 1,300 Explorers Club members and guests gathered Saturday at the Waldorf-Astoria for the club’s annual dinner, which raised more than $300,000.

But explorers don’t eat rubber chicken.

“When you’ve been to Everest, the North Pole, when you’ve been in space, what do you do to have them say, ‘Wow?'” one of the dinner’s organizers, club member Eugene Rurka, said. His answer: Serve up some ants and maggots.

“I think maggots set the tone this year. There were people on cell phones talking about them to people in other countries,” Mr. Rurka said.

The buffet, devised by Mr. Rurka and the Waldorf Astoria culinary team, included more than 30 exotic items served in familiar appetizer formats. Crickets, scorpions, and mealworms adorned toast, puff pastry shells, and endive leaves. Hissing cockroaches were spiced with brandy. And there was a lot of meat: oven-roasted beaver; elk bourguignon; roasted feral hog; Asian-glazed raccoon; blanquette of alligator; rosemary-herbed rattlesnake cakes, not to mention deer and kangaroo.

Tarantula – honey-roasted or deep-fried in batter – was perhaps the most popular and expensive item, “more than $100 for a large one,” Mr. Rurka said.

Mr. Rurka praised the Waldorf team. “It’s a monumental task. How many people want to play with bugs? We bring these things in live. But they look forward to it.”

To wash it all down guests sipped Explorers Club martinis, made with pressure-cooked calf and hog eyeballs stuffed with onions and olives.

Mr. Rurka’s exotics were just one element of the event’s wow factor. The president of the club, Richard Wiese, rode in on a camel, wearing a Moroccan robe he received during a gathering of 45,000 Berbers in the Sahara. James Fowler of “Wild Kingdom” fame brought along a falcon and some big cats.

It turns out that explorers are incapable of long, tedious dinner speeches, although on this night, there were perhaps too many explorers on the program. They included Nobel laureate James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA; Brian Binnie, who has traveled to space on a private expedition, and Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, whose investigation of the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad resulted in the recovery of more than 5,000 artifacts.