A beast with black wings buzzed close and darted past us into the trees: What was that? Was that it? That had to be it. Mallory Sbelgio, citizen scientist, entomologist in training, defender of rare insects, did not quite roll her eyes, though it was remarkable her eyes remained in her head: No, she said, no, that wasn’t the bug we were looking for. She continued walking. Our insect was rarer — in decline throughout the country, but especially Illinois. We were hunting the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, one of relatively few insects to receive a special status: It’s protected by the Endangered Species Act.
A long sliver of a thing alighted on a curling blade of grass, its body sky blue, its wings slim windowpanes. It clung to its green, then zipped off.
There!
“Nope,” Sbelgio said. “Damselfly.”
It was a bright Saturday morning, and we were walking along the Des Plaines River in Will County, stepping around the spongy marshes and flooded banks left by a downpour a few hours before. Dragonflies darted inches above the waterline. But not our dragonfly. Sbelgio was too polite to state the obvious: This was a waste of time, we would never stumble onto a Hine’s by wandering around a forest preserve. Success was statistically unrealistic: According to Andres Ortega, an ecologist who specializes in insects for DuPage County, where the Hine’s is slightly more prevalent, its population in Illinois is “close to extinction — like maybe just 200 to 300 a year. So, incredibly low for an insect.”
Think finding an endangered elephant is hard?
Try finding an endangered insect.
Sbelgio crouched and peered into the forest. She wasn’t always a bug person. As a child, she was scared of everything, until one day her father brought home a tarantula, as a happy-birthday joke. To her shock, she has been hooked on insects ever since. The 27-year-old Lombard native has studied entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and zoology at Miami University in Ohio; lately, she has been trying to start a nonprofit to raise awareness of endangered insects in Illinois.
“All the energy goes into endangered fish and mammals,” she said. “So there are not a lot of us out here, but someone has to advocate for bugs. Most of the time I mention I stand up for endangered insects, I’m met with dead silence. People think ‘endangered’ and ‘insects’ don’t go together. But lose insects, and we are dismantling our ecosystem.”
The good news? As summer ends, there are fewer insects, fewer swats.
The bad news? That insect you just swatted might be the last of its kind.
Scientist after scientist, and research study after research study, has agreed our ecosystem is indeed being dismantled, partly because extinction rates for thousands of wildlife species have accelerated in the past decade. The really bad news: Insects constitute a majority of those species. Tarantulas, for instance. Some biologists believe most tarantulas could be extinct within our lifetime. The suspects are not hard to guess: climate change, development, the human-made decline of natural habitats.
One hope, entomologists say, is the Endangered Species Act.
Invertebrates have been on it since 1976, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted protections to seven species of butterflies. Yet, the trouble with insects is, well, most are not a “charismatic species,” scientists’ term for superstars of the endangered animal kingdom. We coo for pandas and whales. Ants, not so much. “Honestly, endangered insects have been a (public relations) nightmare,” said May Berenbaum, the head of UIUC’s department of entomology. She received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama; “The X-Files” named a character after her. But ask about protecting insects and even she acknowledges “insects are a hard case (for protection). Try arguing for a pygmy hog-sucking louse. Not a great name for something we might want to save.”
You can make eye contact with a rare river otter.
Try that with a beetle that buries roadkill for lunch.
And now, insects face a more existential hurdle — the Trump administration, which has signaled it intends to gut the Endangered Species Act. Never mind melting glaciers — explain to a politician why the extinction of the rattlesnake-master borer moth is a crisis. As the Entomological Society of America noted in a recent statement of support for the Endangered Species Act: Insects are 75 percent of species, and insects are necessary for a healthy environment, but only 84 species of invertebrates have government protection, compared to 439 vertebrates.
So the battle for bugs is lonely.
Sbelgio stared into the forest and shook her head: “People don’t get it. They don’t think insects impact their world at all — something moved!” She trudged off into the thicket, ever careful of where she stepped.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its first list of endangered and threatened species to be federally protected, an outcome of 1966’s Endangered Species Preservation Act. Some of the initial 76 protected animals included manatees, bald eagles, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American alligator. You know, relatable.
By 1970, protections were extended to invertebrates, and in 1973, at the urging of the Nixon administration, the Endangered Species Act, a significantly beefed-up version of the 1966 law, was passed to include protections for the habitats of endangered species. It wasn‘t the federal government’s first rodeo with animal conservation: The Lacey Act of 1900, a response to the decline of passenger pigeons (which eventually went extinct), addressed the illegal trade of animals. Later legislation tried to slow whale hunting and the shooting of migratory birds. Today, the federal Endangered Species List isn’t even the only list: Many states keep their own lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has published a broader “Red List” since 1964, classifies 195 insect species (worldwide) as “critically endangered.”
Still, the Endangered Species Act remains a regulatory outlier compared with conservation laws in many countries, said Andy Suarez, an entomologist at UIUC. “Never mind it gives value to a species, which many people find abstract. The language is pretty blanket — it preserves entire habitats. That’s why a lot of people are terrified of losing it under Trump — conservationists will never get anything like it again.”
Despite strong laws, however, insect protection is awkward.
Insects are small and everywhere. Their lives are short. More butterflies receive protection than, say, flies because they’re outgoing, they pollinate — if you can see a bug, you have a better chance of compiling data on it. Said Michael Jeffords, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey: “Illinois is an insect Venn diagram. We’re on the edge of a lot of (insect) ranges, so accuracy gets rough. On the other hand, we’ve been collecting data since the 1850s. If you don’t see an insect that once lived here, you know they’re done — or their habitat is.”
Bugs die quietly every day.
Since millions of insects remain unidentified, entire species have vanished before we knew they existed. As California condors were captured in the 1980s and brought into breeding programs to prevent their extinction, scientists washed them. However, doing this killed a louse that lived only on California condors. Now that louse is extinct.
The federal Endangered Species Act lists 85 endangered or threatened insects. Illinois’ list is 15 species long and includes Karner blue butterflies, springtails, stoneflies and a scorpion. Crystal Maier, collections manager for invertebrates at the Field Museum, has most of them. She has 4 million bugs stuck on boards, 12 million more floating in alcohol. She walks the cold hallways of the museum’s insect storage room, locates the scientific name of a species, then slides out a series of wooden trays with dead specimens stuck with pins. It’s a combination library/morgue. “And there you … go,” she says cheerfully.
Behold, the striped bark scorpion.
Found rarely in Illinois on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, outside St. Louis; grows no more than 3 inches; black stripe on its back; resembles a crustacean; stings. Maier puts it back and reaches for rare springtails, so tiny the specimens float in vials placed inside jars.
Ask an entomologist why it matters to protect bugs like this, and they rattle off reasons, economic, environmental, moral: Bugs provide billions of dollars of pollinated crops, according to agricultural studies. In the Chicago area, said John Legge, Chicago conservation director of the Nature Conservancy, a lack of biodiversity in natural spaces “can be an illustration of the threat of climate change.” (A few years ago, after an uncommonly cool spring in the Indiana Dunes caused the Karner blue to emerge too soon, the population crashed and never recovered.) Maier, whose own specialty is aquatic beetles, said the biodiversity of the insects along a river or stream is often a warning light of water quality.
There are times, though, where she is hesitant to identify a rare species: “Because you’re not just naming a species anymore, you’re pointing out habitat for protection — which gets politicized.” Indeed, the Reagan administration sought to remove all insects from protection. Instead, “pests” — mosquitoes, ticks, certain beetles, anything regarded as having a negative impact on health or economic concerns like crops — were prohibited. “Yet people assume all bugs are pests,” Berenbaum said. “During the W. Bush years, a recommendation was made to set aside 9,200 acres in Hawaii for flies found nowhere else that had bacterial qualities useful, some said, in developing drugs. The White House said ‘OK,’ and then it set aside 18 acres — a giant middle finger to bugs.”
Consider the journey of the rusty patched bumblebee.
Once common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, it’s found in only 13 states now (including Illinois). It pollinates cranberries, tomatoes. Even dead and stuck with a pin, it’s adorable: fuzzy, colored like an autumn forest. Last fall, the Obama administration announced it would be added to the Endangered Species List. Hours before Rusty was officially listed, the Trump administration delayed inclusion, explaining more study was needed. A coalition of farm and real estate interests had petitioned against Rusty. After the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit, the White House backed down and included Rusty.
This bee’s story isn’t over.
In the spring, work on the Longmeadow Parkway Corridor Project in Kane County, which cut through the bee’s habitat, was halted, then restarted; that battle is ongoing. Yet Rusty’s inclusion has been pivotal, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, which led the decadelong petition process for protection. He sees the bee as a “charismatic” gateway to bringing attention to endangered insects in general. “But the endgame is never the listing. Insects get less money than endangered animals, and almost nothing if they’re not listed, so now the struggle for conservation action begins.”
Xerces, founded in 1971, a pioneer in insect conservation, is not alone. The Nature Conservancy in Chicago buys land that protects local insect habitats; museums launch butterfly counter iPhone apps; the St. Louis Zoo established a Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation.
Just off the lobby of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum — some distance from the live-butterfly exhibit, to prevent contagion — Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology, and Doug Taron, chief curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, breed Baltimore checkerspot butterflies, a vulnerable species. The lab is humid, small. A graduate student is hunched over a table, using a thin paintbrush to delicately sift caterpillar poop from paper cups. That’s nearly the entire arrangement: cups, student, a humidifier, a few leaf greens of food.
“With insects, it doesn’t cost a lot to make a difference,” Lawrence said.
Next summer, after three years, the project will release its Baltimores in Elgin. “Habitat conditions have to be ideal,” Taron said. “The problem is that nature, no matter what you do, throws so much at you.” As with many things in life, it’s the spineless that take the roughest hits.
Grass poked through the fast-moving current on the Des Plaines River. Geese honk-honked overhead. Mallory Sbelgio watched a harvestman (aka daddy longlegs) step carefully around her hand.
It was no Hine‘s emerald dragonfly.
Dead specimens alone are hard to find. Andres Ortega, in DuPage, is eager to change this. His Hine‘s breeding project in Warrenville is a year old. On waterways, he’s carving the kind of shallow channels that Hine‘s look for. And though he wasn‘t involved, when the Illinois Tollway built Interstate 355 across the Des Plaines, the state made the road higher than planned, so motorists didn‘t accidentally speed up the Hine‘s extinction.
“Why spend so much money on a dragonfly?” he asked. “Extinction is normal and happens, but when that removal is unnatural, as we are seeing all over the world, we have a cascading crisis in our backyards.”
The prognosis is grim.
Sbelgio pictures herself on the front lines by staying small. The state rejected her proposal for a nonprofit organization centered on endangered insects. But she’s not going away. Endangered insects make the Endangered Species Act accessible in a way that an endangered polar bear does not, she said — it’s a niche waiting for a leader.
A small quick oblong alien crawled past.
Oh! There!
“That’s an ant,” Sbelgio said. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot of ants.”
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