What’s the Catch?
The Data Trail
There’s something different about the desert this morning. Something’s missing. I don’t notice it at first, but my companion, who has hiked in the Sonoran Desert every week for nearly 30 years, stops on the trail ahead of me and cocks his head. "Listen… not a single bird," Dave Bertelsen says. "We should be hearing cactus wrens, canyon wrens, curve-billed thrashers, Phainopepla " — a crested desert songbird — "Gambel’s quail, Gila woodpeckers. Even in the dead of winter there are birds. This is totally unique. We should be able to just walk along talking and hear birds. To stop and listen hard — I’ve never had to do that before." We’re climbing a winding path on a rock-strewn slope in Saguaro National Park, a few miles west of Tucson’s city limits. The sun, just four days shy of the winter solstice, will be rising soon. As the world pirouettes out of darkness, a diffuse pink light hides the stars and temporarily softens a hushed landscape in which almost everything seems to be barbed, sharp, or hard. In the still, cool air, a hundred million giant saguaro cacti from here to northern Mexico brace for the dawn, getting a few last gulps of carbon dioxide before sealing their pores and holding their breath all day long to minimize water loss. Bertelsen doesn’t know what to make of the absence of birds on this mid-December morning. For now it’s another datum, brand new, puzzling, and disturbing. Besides, we’re not on his favorite trail, north of the city in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the one he has walked 1,270 times — and counting — since 1981. During that span Bertelsen has amassed an enormous amount of information on the elevation, distribution, and bloom dates of some 600 plant species and subspecies; in 1997 he began keeping equally detailed records of the reptiles and mammals he has encountered during his weekly 10-mile hikes. Last year he added birds. "I now have 195,000 observations," he tells me as we saunter among saguaros, some of them as tall as four-story buildings. "It’s a pretty substantial data set." The decades spent walking this landscape have made the 68-year-old retired probation officer a leading expert on the Sonoran Desert’s unique flora and fauna. Bertelsen’s mile-by-mile notes of his treks are so precise and voluminous that a team of scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson is using them to study the effects of global warming here. His records clearly show that about 25 percent of the plant species he has tracked have shifted their ranges to higher, cooler elevations, a response to desert summers that are now close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were 20 years ago. The change is significant, but Bertelsen worries more about stasis. "To me what’s interesting is not the 25 percent of plants that have adapted by moving up. It’s the 75 percent that are not moving up," Bertelsen says. "Twenty-five percent is a lot, but 75 percent aren’t adapting. That has big implications. It means most of the desert is not adapting to climate change. Since I started my hikes, the flora have declined 19 percent — that’s species in bloom per mile that I actually see when I’m hiking. For fauna it’s a 43.5 percent decline per mile. We’re going to lose a tremendous amount." Compared with other besieged but more luxuriant ecosystems, deserts might seem to be relatively hardened to damage, harsh places inhabited by species already used to living on the edge. What, after all, could it matter if a desert, of all places, becomes a little warmer? By one definition the Sonoran Desert isn’t a desert at all. With 11 or 12 inches of rainfall in a good year, parts of it can exceed the 10-inch limit sometimes used to designate a desert. More generally, though, a desert is defined as a region where water scarcity imposes drastic constraints on life, and the Sonoran Desert easily meets that criterion. It covers approximately 100,000 square miles, from southern Arizona and southeastern California to Mexico’s northwestern coast, including most of the Baja peninsula. Of North America’s four deserts, the Sonoran contains by far the greatest diversity of plant and animal species. Unlike the Mojave and Great Basin deserts to the north and the Chihuahuan Desert to the east — which all have cold winters and one rainy season — the Sonoran has mild winters and two rainy seasons, one resulting from winter storms in the Pacific and another from summer monsoons that blow in from the Gulf of California. Without that second pulse of moisture, the Sonoran Desert would blend almost seamlessly with the continent’s other deserts. Low shrubs would dominate the terrain; some annuals would bloom in exceptionally wet years; trees would be scarce. Instead, the extra rain nurtures life found nowhere else in the world. Saguaros, the iconic cacti with great upraised arms, grow only here, along with more than 2,000 other plant species. More than 350 bird species, 60 kinds of mammals, 100 different reptiles, 30 types of freshwater fish, and hundreds of thousands of invertebrates live in the Sonoran Desert. A winter storm watered the desert a few days before my first hike with Bertelsen, and it shows, if you know how to look. Saguaros, like everything here, have evolved to take maximum advantage of intermittent rains. The trunk and arms of a saguaro have vertical pleats, so the entire cactus can inflate like a bellows and store the water absorbed by its roots, which lie just three inches or so below the surface. The roots spread to a distance about equal to the height of the cactus and can guzzle 200 gallons from one rainfall, liquid life that will sustain a saguaro for a year. "This one is full of water," Bertelsen says, pointing with one of his walking poles to a 30-foot-tall saguaro. The waxy surface of the tumescent cactus has become smooth and even. The sun ascends with us as we continue up the slope of what was, 65 million years ago, the caldera of a volcano. Although the morning remains cool, not more than 60 degrees yet, there is no shelter from the sun. Bertelsen moves at a careful, steady pace, though he’s a bit slower now, he says, than before his triple-bypass surgery in 2004, the same year in which he broke a leg and had to be helicoptered off his favorite mountain trail one night. He prefers to start hiking around midnight — nocturnal activity being a sensible strategy for any desert mammal — and will walk through the night and into the following afternoon without sleeping. He’s sturdily built, wearing a black fleece jacket, khaki pants, sunglasses, and a broad-brimmed hat over his straight gray hair. Thousands of tons of water surround us, sequestered in a forest of tall, green living columns; a single mature saguaro might hold as much as eight tons. Water, water, everywhere, but a lost hiker — or an illegal immigrant — would not find a drop to drink in a saguaro grove; the cactus binds its water in a viscous, slimy fluid. The recent rain wasn’t enough to save some saguaros. Paloverdes — thorny-branched trees with green photosynthetic trunks and limbs that shed their leaves during winter — are also suffering. As we wend up the flank of Wasson Peak, which rises 4,639 feet above sea level, Bertelsen’s count of dead or dying plants ticks steadily upward. I ask him if we’re seeing the impact of the Southwest’s protracted drought. "No question," he says. "The last time I was on this trail, maybe 10 years ago, I didn’t see any dead saguaros, certainly no dead paloverdes. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here. I want to see what’s happening. That one’s dying," he adds, nodding at the blackened top of a tall saguaro, multi-armed like some cactus incarnation of Vishnu. Saguaros typically don’t grow arms until they’re at least 75 years old. Judging by the size of its limbs, this one must have been growing for more than a century. It beat many odds during its life, starting as one of the few survivors of the tens of millions of pinhead-size black seeds produced by its parent. Like most saguaros, it probably grew in the lifesaving shade of a nurse plant — a paloverde, acacia, or ironwood tree. After 10 years it would have been just over an inch high; by 30 it would have reached two feet, its growth accelerating exponentially. It endured a drought lasting several years in the 1950s. But the current 14-year drought — the longest in at least a century — is killing it. Saguaros may take two or three years to die. Some remain majestic even in death, standing fully upright, their gray, tubular woody skeletons flensed of all flesh. They’re easy to anthropomorphize. The Tohono O’odham, one of the more than a dozen indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, use the same word — O’odham — for both "people" and "saguaros." ( Tohono means "desert.") In one of their old stories, the first saguaro appeared when a young girl, neglected by her mother, was transformed into a cactus, her arms forever raised to the sky. The vagaries of life here — one saguaro dies while others on the same hillside stand replete with water — suggest to Bertelsen a biotic complexity that defies any sort of generalized explanation. "What makes something appear and disappear? Maybe a sixteenth of an inch of rain, maybe something that is so subtle we’ll never be able to figure it out," he says. "I think it’s too simple to try to explain everything in terms of temperature and precipitation. Maybe rain a day earlier or later makes a big difference. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ll see once, and then see 10 years later. I call them desaparecidos , the disappeared ones. Everything doesn’t bloom every year. You’ve got to watch over a long period of time to see what’s happening." As we walk, Bertelsen keeps up a running commentary on nearly everything we pass: ocotillo, a spindly, spiny shrub with astonishing flame-red flowers; desert mistletoe, a parasite lodged in the branches of paloverdes and other trees; barrel cacti, some of which lean so far toward the sun they uproot themselves; bunches of native grasses — threeawn, bush muhly, tanglehead — that look nearly identical to me; at least two kinds of prickly pear cactus — Engelmann and mojave, their broad pads often gouged by pack rats; teddy bear cholla, singularly uncuddly, even for a cactus — five feet of "don’t even think about touching me," with stubby, plump, jointed arms completely covered with barbed yellow spines that make the whole plant gleam in the bright morning light. Bertelsen carries a comb with him on his hikes in case he brushes a teddy bear — the spines will lodge in your fingers if you try to remove them from elsewhere on your body. "You know a true desert rat because they always have a comb," he says. "Not for their hair." Bertelsen’s careful observations have been honed over the years as what started as casual hikes became something more. "I had read something by Thoreau," he says, "where he wrote how you could tell the time of month by what was blooming. So I started keeping track of blooms — not for anyone, just for curiosity. I always had a journal, but it quickly became obvious that I needed something more. So I started using a checklist. I started making comments about drought in 1994. Plants had been moving up in elevation, but it happened so gradually it was hard to see; you’re too close to it. That’s why stepping back and looking at the data is so useful. I was doing this because I thought it was interesting. I never thought it would be important." "I just about fainted when Dave explained what he had. There was so much information there waiting to be mined." I’m meeting with Theresa Crimmins, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She’s recounting how she and her husband, Michael, a climatologist at the university, first met him five years ago after a talk Michael gave on climate change. "Dave came up to me after the talk and said, ‘I have a big data set. I don’t know if you would be interested,’" Theresa says. "He’d been doing this for 20 years. A paid scientist could never collect something of this magnitude." When I mention Bertelsen’s striking observation that as many as 75 percent of the desert species he’s tracking don’t seem to be adapting to climate change, she offers a more measured judgment. "Dave has an incredible data set," she says, "but it is segmented by mile; there are a lot more species that could be showing more subtle responses on smaller scales that we’re not able to catch right now. " Michael Crimmins echoes his wife’s admiration for Bertelsen’s dedication. "We’ve worked with him to tease out the patterns in his data," he says. "A data set of, first, that quality and, second, that breadth, just doesn’t exist. You would never see this in a funded project. The NSF" — the National Science Foundation — "might give you five years. You couldn’t plan to collect data like this, and Dave is just so good at it, paying attention and being systematic — way better than some field scientists or grad students. Dave does it because he loves it. "What we’ve found is that indeed some plants that bloomed at lower elevations when Dave began are now blooming at higher elevations," Michael continues. "But additionally, we’ve found a very complex dance of species. Some are responding strongly to climate change, some not so strongly. Some are blooming at a lower elevation instead of higher. The true complexity of an ecosystem is that species respond individually to climate change. They’re not going to get together in a forum and decide as a biome or ecosystem that they’ll do this together; they all have unique strategies to deal with climate. The response of many different species to climate change is wrapped up in Dave’s data set, and it’s very complex. "We’re fighting a bit of conventional wisdom here: that species will move upslope, following an envelope of perfect climate for them which is constrained by temperature. You’d expect that as it gets warmer lower down, species will move up. That works for some species, but not for all. The rate of change is the big story with climate change. When you talk with people, one of the arguments they’ll throw back at you is that the climate has always changed, and that is absolutely right. It’s the rate of change that is the problem right now. It’s changing so quickly that it exceeds the adaptive capacity of some species." Some adaptations are straightforward, Theresa tells me, and others less so. Warmer temperatures have allowed saguaros, for example, to expand their flowering range to higher elevations. But the flowering range of other plants — ragweed, wild carrot, and greenspot nightshade, to list just a few — has contracted, their upper-elevation limits remaining unchanged while the lower boundaries of their ranges have moved higher. "For the species showing contractions of their flowering ranges," she explains, "what we think might be going on is that warmer temperatures are becoming increasingly intolerable at the lower ends of their distributions and low-temperature triggers for signaling dormancy are not being reached." The Crimminses published their analysis of Bertelsen’s plant data last year in the journal Global Change Biology . They’re only beginning to study his animal observations. "We need to get that into a database, primarily his information on birds," says Theresa. "He’s saying, just anecdotally, that he’s seeing massive declines in the number of species." Climate change is exacerbating another, more imminent threat to the Sonoran Desert: an invasive species called buffelgrass. "We have an invasion by an African grass that’s capable of unhinging the Sonoran Desert," says Julio Betancourt, a paleoecologist with the United States Geological Survey. "It’s more disastrous than anything climate change can throw at the desert." Betancourt, whose office is just down the hall from Theresa Crimmins, has spent most of his career studying climate change and deserts. Buffelgrass has been introduced to the southern United States as a fodder crop at various times since the late 1800s. It has now spread across southern Arizona and into Mexico, where it outcompetes many native plants. Because it evolved in a part of the world characterized by seasonal fires, it quickly reestablishes itself in areas that have been burned. Betancourt and other scientists worry that the expansion of the range of such a fast-growing species to higher altitudes as a result of global warming could convert the Sonoran Desert into a flammable savanna. The Sonoran Desert has been essentially fire-free for 10,000 years or more. Stands of vegetation tend to be separated by wide stretches of bare, rocky ground, which limits the extent of fires. Very few Sonoran flora are adapted to fire — saguaros die after even small blazes. "Before buffelgrass was here, you could douse a paloverde with gasoline and the fire wouldn’t spread," Betancourt says. In parts of the desert where buffelgrass has covered formerly bare ground, that’s no longer the case. Buffelgrass and other invasive species provided much of the fuel for the fires in 2005 that burned a million acres of desert in Arizona and Nevada. The fires in Arizona, which were sparked by lightning, killed some 80 percent of the vegetation on 250,000 acres, including the largest known saguaro cactus, called the Grand One. "That’s rivaling forest fires," Betancourt says. "I think the premise of conservation will change in the Sonoran Desert. It used to be that you would try to preserve open spaces and let nature take care of itself. That’s no longer the case. If you can’t manage the resource, in a few decades you could have a flammable grassland instead of the saguaros and paloverdes and Gila monsters. The buffelgrass is a test. If we don’t solve it, a lot of things will be moot." "That’s where God lives," Bertelsen says, pointing to a peak on the southwestern horizon. We’re on the summit of Wasson Peak, some 2,000 feet above the trailhead. "It’s Baboquivari Peak. The Tohono O’odham say a god lives there." Tucson spreads below us; its distant edges shimmer in the warm air and seem to lap against the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the northeast, the site of Bertelsen’s 1,270 hikes. On the way back down the trail, Bertelsen quizzes me every 20 minutes or so, asking me to identify various grasses. By mid-afternoon I’ve managed only two correct answers. "What’s that?" he asks, flicking a walking pole. Long seconds pass while I ponder a dry grass tipped with stiff bristles. "Threeawn?" "All right!" He seems genuinely pleased. "You’ve recognized three things. I do that every time I bring someone out, try to get you to recognize three things that you wouldn’t have recognized before. Saguaros don’t count." Later, after pulling a few tufts of buffelgrass in a dry wash, we rest beneath a rock overhang, and the shade sharpens my appreciation of the role nurse plants play in protecting young saguaros. As we drink water, I ask Bertelsen what compels him to walk the same 10-mile trail week after week, year after year. "I don’t think I’m compulsive," he says. "I’m drawn to it. I don’t feel I have to — I just really want to. Every trip there is always something different. Always." I tell Bertelsen his words remind me of a quote from John Burroughs, the nineteenth-century American naturalist: "To find new things, take the path you took yesterday." "Oh, I haven’t heard that!" he says. "I like that. I always tell people, it’s not 1,270 hikes. It’s a hike of 12,700 miles. It’s one journey. It’s not a separate thing. That’s exactly the way I feel about it. It’s one long, continuous walk."
Read more:
The Data Trail
True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist
Nine years ago, I visited London’s Natural History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials — knowing something about writing and little about butterflies — I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire’s archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles. Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum’s Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract "Why Not Eat Insects?" ("Why not indeed!" asked the author. "I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them."), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, "Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people’s pomposity." At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: "There is so much we don’t know!" Vane-Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. "You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound." Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder — there is still so much to discover. Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright’s words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don’t know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought. At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we’ve beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry. We’ve turned the earth into our private estate — a garden here, a junkyard there — and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious. And yet… You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet . It’s a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true? Humans have managed to find and describe an estimated 1.9 million species, about a million of them insects. Every year about 2,400 beetles and 1,200 flies are added to the list. Most biologists believe there are more than 10 million animal species in the world still to discover. In the United States, some 73,000 animal and plant species are unnamed. Recently, in a book called Red Desert: The History of a Place , an entomologist wrote about spending 36 hours sampling insects in the Wyoming desert, making him the world’s leading expert on the area’s arthropods. Of the 5,000 insect species that live in the desert, he estimated that several dozen were not known to science. When the Keeper of Entomology at the Natural History Museum said "you" could spend a week studying some obscure insect and become a world authority, the you in that sentence was an entomologist. Only an entomologist could gain the necessary knowledge in such a short time, not someone like me who doesn’t know a beetle’s anterior apodemes from its mesonotal stridulatory file. Someone like me would take much longer. Someone like me would have to immerse herself in insect physiology as well as general principles of ecology, choose her obscure insect carefully (focusing on ease of collection and observation), and learn some basic field research and laboratory techniques. Someone like me would need to work her way up from rank amateur to professional amateur, often abbreviated to pro-am, also known as citizen scientist. For some time now, traditional research in entomology — how insects behave and where they live — has been the realm of the professional amateur. Partly this is because there are so many species to keep track of and so many good field guides. And then there are all the new Internet sites to help the amateur do this work. While there is some concern that amateurs aren’t rigorous or detailed enough, many scientists welcome the help, especially as climate change causes species to head north or south or disappear altogether. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. I have always wanted to be a field biologist. I imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, hours and days that pass like a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted. I imagine a kind of rapture and loss of ego. John Burroughs, a nineteenth-century American naturalist, wrote that he went to nature "to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more." Burroughs captures exactly my own experience walking through the rural West. I enlarge in nature. I calm down. At the same time, eventually I get bored. Eventually I go home because my work (my writing, my students, my laundry) is elsewhere. But what if that employment, my engagement with the world, was right there, in the largeness and calm of nature? For Burroughs and other naturalists, a passion for what is obscure and unsung in nature is about passion itself. This is the herpetologist mad for a leopard frog, the botanist most happy parsing forbs. In some way, such unworldly love is about authenticity. To devote your life to crayfish? That’s authentic. Such love is also about competence and a vertical burrowing into knowledge. Vertical would be a new direction for me, since my understanding of the world is almost completely horizontal. I know a little bit about a lot. I stretch around the world knowing a little bit about state politics, national scandals, ocean chemistry, and Indonesia. My reach is long, but I don’t go deep. The woman (scientist, pro-am, or rank amateur) who wants to understand the Canyon Rubyspot damselfly, however, must think differently. She must also know about canopied streams, insectivorous bats, and flycatchers. She must think vertical, burrowing into one place. I have always wanted to be John Burroughs, and I have also wanted to be a rock-and-roll musician. Here I am, a woman in her fifties, in good physical shape, with a lively mind, having zero chance of becoming so many things — an ER doctor or the creator of cool television shows. We are defined by our limits as much as our loves. At every point in life, there is a long list of what we will not ever be. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. John Burroughs was one of those semi-annoying optimists. "If you think you can do it, you can," he wrote. "Leap and the net will appear." Could I take not a week but many weeks in my life and become what I was not: a "leading world authority" on some obscure species of mite or dragonfly in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, which also happens to be my own backyard? I am searching in my kitchen drawer for cheesecloth. Marriage is about balance. My husband is a saver. I am a purger. Just last week, I purged this kitchen drawer of a wad of cheesecloth that I pretended had gone stale. We never use cheesecloth! But now I need it for my tiny pink-orange eggs and tiny black larvae and somewhat larger black larvae and rather active Calligrapha serpentina adult beetles that I am keeping in a series of labeled jars. A square of cheesecloth secured with a rubber band would be the perfect lid, preventing escape while allowing in air. I have also been told to wet a wad of cheesecloth and leave it in the jar so the insects won’t desiccate. I feel a familiar stab: purger’s regret. In my efforts to become a leading world authority, I have already made my first big mistake. I did not choose Calligrapha serpentina for its obscurity. I went for beauty instead. This leaf beetle is a stunner, with shiny green-gold wings marked by a sinuous, symmetrical pattern of black dashes, swirls, and fillips. Even the name is beautiful, the name of the lover in a poem, "Oh, Calligrapha! Oh, Serpentina!" Typing just a description of this insect into Google gets me 10 photos on BugGuide.net. Fortunately, the life cycle of Calligrapha serpentina is not as celebrated or well known. As a member of the large and commonly encountered beetle family Chrysomelidae , in the genus Calligrapha (with more than 80 recognized species native to North and South America), this insect is not even noteworthy as a pest, unlike its cousins the potato, cucumber, asparagus, and bean leaf beetles. As one entomologist explained to me in an e-mail: "In spite of their showy appearance, little is known about the life history of most species of Calligrapha . Much of the information that you desire has never been published. If you carefully document and publish your observations, they would constitute valuable scientific contributions." That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Early in the summer of 2009, when I first dreamed of becoming a pro-am, dozens of these metallic green beetles were vigorously mating on the leaves of the globe mallow ( Sphaeralcea augustifolia ) growing in my yard. About one centimeter long, the insects clamored and humped on top of one another like so many miniature Volkswagen pileups. On the underside of globe mallow leaves, their eggs could be found massed irregularly in pink-orange groups, each cylindrical pink-orange egg about one millimeter long with smooth and shining ends. Although I never observed a beetle laying eggs, in 1908 the zoologist Robert Hegner watched a similar species and wrote one of the few descriptions. As the insect clings to the undersurface of a leaf, the tip of its abdomen "moves rhythmically up and down about fifteen times at intervals of a little less than one second," he wrote. Following a drop of colorless liquid, the egg emerges and is attached to the leaf by the fluid. The insect shifts slightly, and the process begins again. Hegner studied 54 pairs of beetles of three species, Calligrapha multipunctata , Calligrapha bigsbyana , and Calligrapha lunata , with host plants of willow and wild rose. The females, slightly larger than the males, each produced an average of 315 eggs from June 15 to August 27. The average time for hatching was about six days, and the small emerging larvae were gregarious, eating their host plant together, shedding their skins together as they grew larger, dropping to the soil to pupate at about the same time, and emerging together as adults. Hegner found the average larval stage to be 20 days and the average pupal stage 12 days — about 38 days from egg to beetle. My observations of Calligrapha serpentina were much the same, although I never had as many insects or watched their rhythmic movements quite so closely. I did raise a number of eggs to adults, cheering on as the squirming dots of black broke out of their egg cases, began to eat the leaf they stood on, and grew steadily into dark, hairy lumps with reddish-brown heads and six legs. As beetle larvae grow and shed their skin, each new stage is called an instar. Compared with its former miniatures, the final instar of Calligrapha serpentina seemed monstrous — a great galumphing fellow covered in long bristles, the head and front legs seeming to strain and heave their appendage of a body like Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars series. In my role as voyeur, I was also a manipulator, a kind of God in the life of Calligrapha serpentina . Not all of my charges survived. In truth, the habitat I provided was hit or miss. Too much water, and a fungus could grow that would attack the eggs. Too little water, and the larvae dried up. I sometimes had to travel with my jars (who can you really trust to feed your larvae?) and wondered about the effect of the car’s motion. I knew that temperature could alter the timing of my beetles’ hatching and growing, and I worried that the jars were too much in the sun. Or in the shade? Some of my black dots may have been worried too. A surprising number of them escaped through the holes in the cheesecloth. In the end, these insects may have done better with me than in the wild, where they would have been constantly exposed to predators. Whenever I felt particularly inept, I went online. Sites such as buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net offer all kinds of information and anecdotes. Asked nicely, professional entomologists readily send advice. One consoled me: "Freezing excess immatures is a painless (to them) and effective method of discarding insects you probably cannot and/or should not release locally. Alas, there is much death and death-dealing in this work." This same entomologist concluded: "Please remember, specimens are worthless without data. THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE DATA. And it’s about sharing your data through publication for the entertainment and education of others. I assign a specimen number to every animal or series of like animals when I collect them. These numbers go on their jars, written on masking tape. So a monarch larva gets the number 9856, say, and a series of pyralid caterpillars in their communal webbing initially gets the number 9857, with each caterpillar getting a letter code when they are isolated, as 9857-A, 9857-B, etc. Thus when I get two parasitoids, different wasp species, from jar 9857-M, I know that both wasps developed inside A SINGLE CATERPILLAR, which is high quality information." One day, in my own jars, a number of the monstrous black instars of Calligrapha serpentina started turning pinkish-orange and then became wholly pinkish-orange and finally could be seen writhing and thrusting out their abdomens in what appeared to be a painful and desperate act. It could be that this is how instars bury themselves in the dirt in order to pupate. I don’t know. I couldn’t watch for long because I had to go to work (a fact that instantly labels me Not a Real Naturalist). Later I would find the pupae motionless in the soil that I had put in the bottom of the jar. Beetles often pupate naked, without a cocoon or protective casing. Under my hand magnifier, each pink-orange oval seemed to contain a curled-up, mummylike creature beneath a translucent coating — although there may have been no actual coating, only the shiny surface of the half-forming beetle. Days later still, the miracle: metamorphosis, the great spiritual metaphor and enactment of myth. Sometimes I could see the patterned wings under what still looked like a thin covering and then the legs were distinct and then the beetle quivered and was there, moving as if dazed, fumbling in the dirt. In a few moments the wings had dried and the miracle began to lumber across the bottom of the jar toward a globe mallow leaf. Now — and again and again as the beetles pupated and emerged — I saw that the resulting insect was beautifully colored red and black, not green and black. Had I raised up the wrong species? Was I a kind of anti-naturalist? Particularly gifted in doing the wrong thing? Was this some effect of an artificial environment? Or, since some beetles are known to hybridize, perhaps this represented a cross between species? As my jars filled up with pure red and black beetles, all looking alike, I theorized that red was a juvenile stage — a possibility no one had mentioned to me or discussed in the scientific literature. In about a week, the red beetles turned green. Testable question. Hypothesis. Conclusion. I felt like a kid who had just won first prize at the science fair. Okay, this was not the first of many "valuable scientific contributions." I never could determine how many instars the larvae went through. My examination of the pupae was hardly thorough and did not include dissection. As important, I am not sure how the beetle overwinters. I think the last adult generation of the season goes dormant once the temperature drops. (By the first of September, I could not find any beetles outside on my globe mallow.) But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I also never became comfortable with beetle anatomy. In volume 2 of American Beetles, when I am faced with a description of Chrysomelidae in which the dorsum is "usually glabrous, vestiture when present sparse to dense and consisting of simple hairs," I can only murmur back, " ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…" I do believe, however — and I am proud of this — that I have a fairly complete collection of all the papers ever written on Calligrapha serpentina , including the 1897 "Biological Notes on Some Coleoptera From New Mexico," the heavily illustrated 1941 "Relationships Within the Family Chrysomelidae as Indicated by the Male Genitalia of Certain Species," and the 2006 "The Evolution of Unisexuality in Calligrapha Leaf Beetles." It is a small personal library my friends are welcome to peruse on any weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. Unfortunately, my own documentation was essentially confined to notes on my desk calendar, with "eggs in Jar #2 hatched" sandwiched between "call optometrist" and "potluck at Madge’s, make salad." I have no plans to publish, only to e-mail a few entomologists ("I think the red coloring of Calligrapha serpentina is the juvenile phase! I’m so excited!") and tell my new friends on buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net . I did not, did not, become a leading world authority on Calligrapha serpentina . And, yes, I feel bad about withholding that information until near the end of this essay. Sorry. What I did do was add my voice to a chorus, standing shoulder to shoulder in that growing crowd of citizen scientists who rarely become individual experts but who contribute to the collective expertise. We send our observations to the real experts who can then make them part of their research and publication. Moreover, for the citizen scientist, this is not really about publishing data, as important as that is. The further job of the citizen scientist is to mesh the world of science with, well, the world of citizenry. We trumpet the beauty of Calligrapha serpentina to friends, co-workers, relatives, real estate developers, and politicians. The more we fall in love with our own backyard — with the marvel and complexity of life — the more committed we are to protecting its diversity. In my case, once I started looking for one beautiful green and black beetle, I found so much more: many more eggs, brown or white, red or yellow, and many more larvae, some that deceive by looking like bird droppings and some that hide by rolling up in leaves. In a single morning, I might find a marbled orb weaver like some aproned, plump grandma, 1,675 ants, and the grace of a pipevine swallowtail. I saw that Dick Vane-Wright was truly right when he said, "There is so much we don’t know," and that lots of things I don’t know are outside my front door, the theater of insects playing all summer long. Nor is my infatuation with Calligrapha serpentina over. I have learned that I am not really made for the exacting work of a scientist, the tedium of 9857-A, 9857-B, 9857-C. A leading world authority needs many more jars and would label them better. But I do have plans next fall for a large outdoor terrarium filled with the larvae and beetles of Calligrapha serpentina and their host plant. As cold weather approaches and the globe mallow dies, I can watch and observe. How do these beetles overwinter? I hope to find out.
More here: True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist