Salt Creek Tiger Beetle Educator Guide

There's the atlas beetle that's black and shiny like a newly washed Harley Davidson motorcycle. There's leafcutter ants that slice leaves off of trees with a cut as clean as a butcher's knife would make. (Those leaves become fungi, which is actually what they eat.) I'd never seen anything like a violin mantis before. This bark-colored creature flexes at the joints as it moves to make it seem more like a robot.

"Eewww!!" That's what a lot of people say when they see bugs. Kay Klatt, Supervisor of the Butterfly and Insect Pavilion at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, says, "That's perfect. That's what gets people interested, especially young people. What is that? What does it do? How does that work? That's what might motivate someone to want to work with insects when they grow up."

The staff couldn't stop telling me about the creatures as they showed them to me. They talked about how many times they've been bitten or what species have bitten them, but they even did that with enthusiasm. I learned a lot about many types of bugs in a short amount of time. But the other thing I learned is that rare and fragile creatures like Salt Creek tiger beetles are in good hands when people like this are looking out for them. The odds are stacked against the tiger beetles, but if they make it, it will be because there are people with a passion to help them.

The passion will be a test of patience for the next several months. All the staff can do with the Salt Creek tiger beetle larvae is feed it. To do that, its food is placed at the top of a tube of soil, then the larvae will come to the top to get it. I was surprised to learn that's about all the staff can do — watch and wait until (hopefully) the larvae turn into beetles and then can be released into saline habitats near Lincoln next spring.

The Salt Creek tiger beetle is one of the most endangered species in the United States, with only two to five hundred beetles left. They're found only in a small saline wetland area just north of Lincoln, Nebraska. We visited the wetland with Mitch Paine, a former research assistant at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln who worked with the beetles and comes back every summer to photograph the Salt Creek tiger beetles.

Produced by Diego Moreno / QUEST Nebraska. Beetle photographs by Mitch Paine.

The film follows Kavanaugh and his collaborator, University of California-Berkeley doctoral candidate Sean Schoville, as they search for the beetle, then put possible candidates to the test by dissecting them under the microscope and doing genetic testing on them.

It's rare for a biologist to predict the discovery of a new species – even for someone like Kavanaugh, who has discovered 73 new species. For his prediction, he drew inspiration from Charles Darwin's own prediction, which the English naturalist and founder of modern evolutionary biology made in 1862.

When Darwin saw an orchid from Madagascar with a foot-long nectare, he predicted that a pollinator would be found with a tongue (called a proboscis) long enough to reach the nectar inside the orchid's very thin, elongated nectar "pouch." Darwin's prediction was based on his finding that all living beings are related to each other and that some of them evolve closely together. His prediction came true in 1903, when a moth was discovered in Madagascar with a long, thin proboscis, which it uncurls to reach the nectar in the orchid's nectare. In the process of feeding from the orchid, the moth serves as its pollinator. The moth was given the scientific name Xanthopan morganii praedicta, in honor of Darwin’s prediction.

"Chasing Beetles, Finding Darwin" is QUEST TV's contribution to the celebration of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book "On the Origin of Species."

Watch Chasing Beetles, Finding Darwin online. You can also see additional photos for this story.

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What is on the public floors of the museum is just the tip of the iceberg of the Academy's collections. Over a span of more than 150 years, the Academy has built an invaluable collection that acts as a strong backbone for the museum. Twenty million research specimens and 38,000 live animals have to be carefully packed and transported. The Academy is undertaking the most massive move ever undertaken by a museum.

The Botany collection was the first to move out of Howard Street. It took only eleven and a half days to move two million specimens. For perspective, it took 61,300 cardboard inserts bundled with over 40 miles of twine to bundle the flora. Botany is only one of eight Academy research departments preparing to move.

The Academy's packing list is as varied as its research. Ornithology and Mammalogy have to transport Monarch, the last Grizzly bear of California. Because of its size and girth, it will not be boxed. However, it will take several movers to transport it carefully. Monarch will be joined by 30,000 other mammal specimens, including study pelts, skulls, skeletons, and the world's largest collection of marine mammal specimens.

It will be even more challenging to move the Academy's live animals. 38,000 live animals will be moved, water included, back to the Park in tanks of varying sizes. One of the aquarium's Australian Lungfish will be the oldest living animal to move. Over seventy years old, this fish has seen the Academy through many changes– a move to Howard Street, and now the move back to Golden Gate Park.

The Academy's Galápagos collection will also be packed up. It features thousands of Geospizine Finches (the group studied by Darwin) and the world's largest collection of reptiles from the Galápagos.

Cultural keepsakes will be preserved. Pre-Columbian Inca clothing, 12th Century Persian ceramics, fragile feather leis, full-sized Native Alaskan kayaks, 500 Japanese folk toys, and a renowned collection of eating utensils will also find their home in Golden Gate Park.

To give you a sense of the immensity of the project, 20 million specimens include the following:

• Over 200,000 fish specimens preserved in alcohol, including a rare coelacanth (thought to be extinct until discovered in the 1930s);
• 14.5 million insects and arachnids, including more than 874,789 flies, some 524,666 true bugs, nearly 3 million beetles, and more than 700,000 butterflies and moths;
• Nearly 100,000 bird specimens, including the now-extinct Guadalupe Storm Petrel and 10,600 sets of bird nests and eggs;
• More than a quarter of a million reptiles and amphibians from 166 countries.

The sheer volume of this move makes it a migration. Over 20 million specimens can not be moved in a day. It will take every one of those 265 days to move and prepare to share the wealth of the Academy once again with the public. To find out more about this "Great Migration" and the museum that will ultimately house the collections – visit http://www.calacademy.org/newacademy.

Cat Aboudara is the Special Projects Manager at California Academy of Sciences and works in the public programs division. The Academy is a wonderful fit for her because of her curiosity about the natural world and her experience in working with native California wildlife.

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