Hunting Ground Beetles in Great Basin National Park

Written from an article by Riva Madan, Frank Hsu and Kip Will, University of California, Berkeley, in The Midden (Great Basin National Park), Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 2015.

A gap in the map

Ground beetles (family Carabidae) live all over the world and are common across the U.S. Yet Nevada has published records of only 242 species — the second-shortest list of any state. Only Delaware, with 206, has fewer, and Delaware covers a little over 6,400 square kilometers against Nevada's more than 286,000. Nevada's carabids are clearly understudied.

The goal: an updated checklist of Nevada's carabids. Alongside work on museum specimens, the team collected at Great Basin National Park, helping the park document its biodiversity.

The trip, day by day

June 10, 2015. Park ecologist Gretchen Baker welcomed the team with a map and tips (including the park's starry nights). At Baker Creek Campground, Will found a Rhadine — a seldom-collected genus that includes cave dwellers — inside the restroom. Night collecting turned up mostly Pterostichus protractus, one of the park's dominant species. Peeling bark revealed a group of sleepy hornets (carefully tucked back in); a bat nearly hit a headlamp. Cold drizzle ended the night, and the tent leaked.

June 11. The team set three UV-light traps — at Baker Lake Trail, Grey Cliffs and Lehman Creek — for night-flying beetles, and homemade ramp traps (built from pipette boxes) at Snake Creek, NF road 446, near the Strawberry Creek trailhead and along the Osceola ditch trail. At road 446 they found a deer skull picked clean by insects.

June 12. Up to about 11,000 feet: from Wheeler Peak Campground to Teresa Lake, searching the melting edges of snow patches for Bembidion and Trachypachus. Nothing at first, then plenty under rocks by the lake — small, fast beetles caught with an aspirator ("pooter") — and unfamiliar cold-water beetles in the inflowing stream. That night a mercury-vapor light sheet at Snake Creek drew mostly scarabs and darkling beetles (Tenebrionidae), plus two handsome Carabus taedatus and some Amara, small harpalines, Bembidion and Pterostichus.

June 13. Cool, showery weather had made the traps disappointing — some empty, some full of ants — with mostly Pterostichus, many Calathus and darkling beetles. A long hike to Dead Lake, a small pond off the trails that nearly dries up in summer, looked unpromising but yielded many more species. On the way down, Will thought he had found the rare "stink beetle" Nomius pygmaeus under a fallen tree; under the microscope it was the common Psydrus piceus — still a new species for the park's list.

June 14. Home to California, with specimens to sort, pin and list.

The result

Between the trip and — mostly — museum specimens, the team had easily more than 60 carabid species to add to Nevada's list.

Sources

Written from "Searching for Beetles in Great Basin National Park," by Riva Madan, Frank Hsu and Kip Will, published by the National Park Service in The Midden and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. State species counts are from Bousquet (2013). The article's photographs, credited to Kip Will, are not reproduced.