Category Archives: beetles

Zombies vs. Wildlife

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Can I be Boing Boing when I grow up? Last week it ran a post by National Wildlife Federation naturalist David Mizejewski on how wildlife would save us if there were ever a zombie attack and if whatever caused zombification only affected humans.

“If there was ever a zombie uprising, wildlife would kick its ass,” Mizejewski says in the piece.

What follows is an overview of wildlife’s role in cleaning up the undead, from carrion eating birds, to carnivores that will go for anything slow-moving, to detritivores like maggots and beetles. It’s got lots of videos, so this is not lunchtime reading.

Our cultural zombie moment is peaking now, so enjoy. But when zombies finally jump the shark, remember, you heard it here first. (Well, second.)

“Zombies vs. animals” in Boing Boing, here.

Burying Beetles and Goshawks Up

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goshawk-259x300Here’s some good news for a Monday morning.

– Wildlife biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) have discovered Northern Goshawks successfully breeding in the State for the first time since 2006. Read the Maryland Department of Natural Resources press release, here.

– A second wild American burying beetle population now calls Nantucket, Massachusetts home, thanks to a successful captive breeding and reintroduction program, which began in 1996 at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island. Read this Endangered Species Act Success Story on the US Fish and Wildlife Service website, here. Lots of photos.

Photo: Can I tell you how lucky you are that I went with the goshawk and not the burying beetle grubs? Courtesy of the Maryland Dept. of Natural Resources.

Return of a Classic Beetle

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“The last documented American burying beetle in Missouri was collected from Newton County (southwest Missouri) in the mid-1970s,” says a US Fish and Wildlife press release. “Historically, It was recorded in 35 states, including 13 counties throughout Missouri, and was most likely found throughout the state.”

In June, the federally endangered beetle will return to the Missouri prairie, with the reintroduction of American burying beetles bred at the St. Louis Zoo. The zoo-bred beetles will be released on The Nature Conservancy’s Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie (link to more info about the reintroduction).

Local news reports seem to be focusing on the fact that this population has been declared “experimental,” so the usual Endangered Species Act protections don’t apply.
Springfield News-Leader
St. Louis Public Radio

Photo courtesy of US Forest Service

Beetles in the Big City

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An article in the September issue of Ecological Applications asks: “Do birds and beetles show similar responses to urbanization?” The answer: No.

Birds are the go-to animals when it comes to studying the impacts of urbanization, but how well do birds represent other animal groups?

A paper in a 1999 issue of Ecological Applications found that the biodiversity of birds and butterflies correlate well across the urban gradient.

However, this paper, and others, say that beetles respond to different aspects of urbanization than birds do. A 2007 paper in the journal Landscape Ecology reported on a French study of birds, beetles and small mammals and concluded that urban woodlands were an important reservoir of species diversity. Another study conducted in Europe, Canada and Japan, and published in Global Ecology and Biogeography in 2009 found that urbanization itself didn’t have a big impact on ground beetle diversity, but that forest species were lost when the forest was lost.

This is all helpful to know if you are trying to conserve beetles, but also for understanding urban ecology.


Photo: Carabid beetle By Michael K. Oliver, Ph.D. (Photo taken by me) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons