Beauty of the Beast

Beautiful little scarab beetles dotted the stems of Bee Balm as I left our raptor enclosure. I monitor our stunning native garden beds regularly between surveying butterfly occurrences and, once in a while, borrowing a few leaves or blossoms to brighten my salad lunch. This morning, I counted three Japanese beetles—metallic beauties with a complicated status as highly destructive invasive insects.

These beetles really are little beauties. Their heads and thoraxes gleam emerald green, while polished copper wing covers catch the light like tiny pieces of jewelry. I've always admired their appearance, which has become common across my ten years in the Northwoods.

I found these two being friendly during my early days
working at the Museum. What was once a novel experience
has become a regular occurrence. 

Beauty isn't always good news.

Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) arrived in the United States over a century ago, likely hidden in soil accompanying imported ornamental plants. Without many of the predators and diseases that keep them in check in their native range, they spread steadily across the eastern United States and, eventually, into Wisconsin. Today they feed on hundreds of plant species, skeletonizing leaves, damaging flowers, and weakening both wild and cultivated plants.

I crossed paths with Lee from Drummond, recently, and was totally captured by his account of his latest hobby of counting Japanese beetles. And it's not just the beetles on his monitoring route - winsome flies (Istocheta aldrichi), a parasitoid of the Japanese beetle, have been making a noticeable appearance on the backs of beetles. They first appear as small, white grains (eggs) on the beetles, and sometimes several at a time.  A trained eye could pick up on their presence without need for equipment. Lee explained that we'd likely find them at the beetle's thorax, where after hatching, they'll burrow down into the body and eventually kill the beetle. 

Lee has been surveying his property the last two seasons and reporting numbers back to Dr. Bill Hutchison, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. Their protocol? Observe Japanese beetles daily, comparing specimens with evidence of winsome fly larvae to those with none. Lee has since reported over 50% fly presence consistently, anecdotally pointing to a viable means of "hands-off" control of the Japanese beetle populations in our neck of the woods. 

The Museum has been surveying our pollinator gardens for six summers now, though only focusing on adult butterflies. If we open to other data gathering activities, we can seemingly be at a front line of Japanese beetle monitoring in the Northwoods. 

Before getting ahead of myself, I returned my attention to our collections. We care for thousands of specimens documenting Northwoods life, from butterflies and dragonflies to birds, mammals, fungi, and fossils. We have a cabinet full of pinned insects - the volume of which has impressed even the most intimidating of my contacts from much, much larger collections. I found it likely we'd have at least one Japanese beetle in our cases.

To my surprise, the only Japanese beetle captured in our collection was an image on a glass plate image. These types of photographs were generally made more than a century ago. With limited documentation, I had no clue when that little beetle made an appearance. Effectively, we still have the opportunity to contribute the first Japanese beetle to our collection. 

As museums, we often think of collections as preserving the distant past. Just as often, they preserve the present. A beetle gathered today may become evidence decades from now of when a species first became established. They can map the movement of and connections between Beings in our community, both welcomed and troubling. 

Sometimes history arrives looking like a jewel.