Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

New species of beetle in the sand dunes
December 14, 2005

How long has it been since you have visited the sand dunes? On beautiful cool and clear and still winter evenings, the delicate pastel colors of sand and sky along with the soft curves of the dunes are exhilirating! The red stems of the Giant Dropseed and of Sandreed shimmer before the sun finaly fades. Take a kid over and go skidding down the dunes with her or him.

"There has been a new species of stag beetle found in the Monahans Sand Hills State Park," read an email from Mike Quinn, the chief Texas Parks and Wildlife entomological information specialist. Mr. Quinn and I have corresponded several times about monarch butterflies, black witch moths, and the peculiar eggcase building habits of a local population of cellar spiders.

He maintains a number of entomological websites and "listserves" where "buggy" people correspond. Mr. Quinn sent along some other information along with his official news release about the discovery. He noted there are three endemic (living only in one region of the world) species of scarab beetle in the sand dunes between the Pecos River and the Mescalero Escarpment, the western edge of the Llano Estacado. (An old Spanish name for the region is Los Medanos, but no one uses it much anymore.)

M.J. Paulsen, a graduate student in entomology at the University of Nebraska, spent a few days in the state park in early June of this year. Many scientists have stopped at the sand dunes to quickly survey the park, but with much of the invertebrate world still unknown, it is only mildly surprising for a new species to be found; undescribed, unstudied, and not part of the local folkbiology.

The beetle’s closest known relatives live over a thousand miles away, in the sandbars of rivers, beginning in Tennessee and Iowa and in areas further north and east. Paulsen named it Nicagus occultus – occultus means hidden, which reflects both it not being seen by other researchers, but also because a number of the male beetles were observed hiding under the sand with only their antennae showing.

The beetle is only 5-10 mm in length, and is a dark brown in color. Nothing spectacular, in other words, but Paulson did find hundreds of individuals "hilltopping" before sunset or after sunrise. Many insects and some snakes "hilltop," a behavior in which groups of males gather on the highest point of an area and await the arrival of females. Males of Nicagus outnumbered females five to one in Paulsen’s observations. This mating behavior may have been stimulated by the late May and early June rains, so it may not happen every year, or at the same time during the year, which would also be a factor in its being "hidden" to the eyes of previous scientific visitors.

The larvae of other species of Nicagus feed on rotting wood at the surface of the soil, but after Paulsen spent hours trying to locate larvae, he concluded that they might feed on rotting wood far below the surface of the dunes. The larvae of a Japanese Nicagus feeds on oak wood, and as every west Texan knows, the dune field that stretches from Crane to Fort Sumner, New Mexico is the home of the world’s largest contiguous oak forest (of shin-oak, or shinnery, Quercus havardii).

Mr. Quinn provided links to Paulsen’s personal website, the scientific paper that officially described the new species, and to Tex-Ento, a list-serve for Texas entomologists begun in November 2005. Tex-ento had a series of pictures of the beetle burying into the sand, posted by Dr. John Abbott of the University of Texas.

I had heard of Abbott previously, from dragonfly enthusiasts who often refer to his website, Odonatacentral, the most comprehensive website featuring dragonflies. Another link led me to bugguide. Bugguide’s goal is to eventually have photographs and electron microscope photographs, text about the known life history, and scientific descriptions and range maps of every species of invertebrate in the United States. Bugguide also had pictures of the new species.

The Internet is slowly reaching its potential for serving as a compendium of knowledge – specialists such as those mentioned above make it part of their work to create clearinghouses of information about their interests. One of the Sibley Nature Center’s roles is to gather information about every living thing in our home bioregion – the Llano Estacado, and its surrounding habitats. Our job is made much easier by the work of hundreds of specialists posting their information on the World Wide Web.

Earlier this spring in this column I wrote about Deborah and I identifying a species of plant while sitting in our car at the site where we found a species of plant that we had never seen. We went on-line via our laptop while hooked up to a cell phone used as a modem. If we had had our botanical library with us, we still would have had to flip through dozens of books to find it, instead of the 5 minutes that it took using the Internet. (Of course, it helped that we recognized that it was likely to be of a specific genus!)

Even with more than 1000 books in the Sibley Library we have never been able to begin to be able to identify (to the species level) the majority of the local invertebrates. Until the 1990s regional field guides on a specific group of invertebratess were not published. The first regional field guides were created to please the growing numbers of amateur butterfly and dragonfly enthusiasts (who were earlier either birding or wildflower enthusiasts.)

I enthusiastically told a number of people about the beetle, and to no surprise I received one expected comment – "what good is the bug, and who cares?" I used an answer I had heard a rancher give once about why he protected rattlesnakes on his spread – "The Good Lord must have created them for a reason, and if we are smart enough we will someday learn why." I think it is a marvelous and wonderful thing that the sand dunes has species of creatures that live no where else in the world. It makes the sand dunes an even more special place in my heart. I love the dunes – they are beautiful! No matter how familiar the landscape seems, there is always something new to be discovered.