Know Your Insects & Save Them, Too: The North American Giant Stag Beetle – CleanTechnica

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For all the fuss over the beautiful Monarch butterfly, educating people about the role of insects in a healthy ecosystem is an uphill climb, and now the stressed global ecosystem is losing insects at a furious pace. Maybe it’s time to share some love and attention with bugs that are annoying, elusive, or downright fugly, and that’s what the new National Geographic series A Real Bug’s Life has tasked itself to do.

A Real Bug’s Life Season 2 is unspooling on Disney+ beginning January 15. You can catch the trailer here for a sneak peek featuring my personal favorite, first-of-its-kind footage of Lucanus elaphus or the North American Giant Stag Beetle in action. I had a chance to speak with one of the featured entomologists, Michael J. W. Carr, who has studied the Stag Beetle here in the US. Following is our interview, edited for clarity and flow, and then after that some details from the scientific journals.

Insects: The Annoying, The Elusive, & The Fugly

CleanTechnica: Movies like Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones are credited with sparking a wave of interest in paleontology and archeology. Are insects the next frontier?

Carr: That would be the ultimate success of A Real Bug’s Life. It hits the middle ground between entertainment and science. The show does a really good job of displaying the value and personality of unpopular insects, like fire ants.

CleanTechnica: Is the pollinator conservation movement helping people get more comfortable about sharing the planet with other insects, too?

Carr: Pollinators are something that everyone can get on board with and enjoy. Butterflies and bees are good “starter insects.” Being unsure about what the organism will do contributes to phobia, so getting people to handle unfamiliar insects, like Madagascar cockroaches, helps to remove the stigma.

CleanTechnica: Aside from establishing a pollinator garden or a rain garden, how can people roll out the welcome mat for pollinators and other insects in their own backyards?

Carr: Even a small step away from a lawn can help. You don’t have to replace the whole lawn. You can grow some creeping thyme or low-growing phlox. You can also bury logs in a rain garden or pollinator garden. A Real Bug’s Life also shows that dead wood is important for saproxylic beetles like the Giant Stag Beetle. And, these insects are important because they help sequester atmospheric nitrogen.

Death, Decay, & Love In The Forest

Two North American Giant Stag Beetles make a dramatic appearance in the “Love in the Forest” episode of A Real Bug’s Life. It’s the first-ever footage of a fight between two of the bizarre looking bugs, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of known unknowns about them.

Entomologists like Carr have been trying to piece together more information about the lifecycle of stag beetles for decades. Dead and decaying wood has emerged as a key piece of the lifecycle puzzle.

In Europe, where stag beetles are heading for extinction due to forest habitat loss, urban gardens can provide an opportunity to help stabilize the population. In particular, entomologists have been trying to get gardeners in the UK to ditch the “clean garden” aesthetic and make room for some old stumps and logs to decay.

“Up to 30 percent of all forest insect species depend on wood that is dead or dying,” notes the organization The Wildlife Society.

As part of the conservation effort, researchers have been developing new, more effective ways to monitor the bug. Along the way, a team of entomologists recently made an interesting discovery about the love life of the European stag beetle.

“This species is classified as near-threatened across much of its range and is extinct in Denmark,” the authors note in a paper published last spring in the journal Nature.

The research team provided some insights into why so many knowledge gaps remain. “The prolonged, subterranean larval phase and comparatively short visible adult phase of the life cycle, lasting up to approximately twelve weeks, have made this species extremely difficult to monitor accurately,” they write.

Nevertheless, the research team was able to unearth some new lifecycle details. “Here, we report on a surprising discovery of a male-produced pheromone, which provokes initial sexual receptivity in females, and which has not been previously identified in the animal kingdom,” they reported. “Furthermore, we assign sex pheromone function to a previously described female-specific compound.”

Saving The Insects, One Lawn At A Time

Asking individual gardeners to counterbalance, if not overcome, the vast amount of government-enabled private capital contributing to habitat loss is barking up the wrong tree in terms of who is responsible for the looming insect apocalypse.

Still, here in the US individual lawn owners can collectively make a significant contribution to habitat restoration, because there are so many, many lawns.

The National Wildlife Federation cites a figure of 40 million acres, an area the size of the state of Colorado, for lawn coverage in the US. “These perfectly manicured landscapes, while picturesque, now consume around 9 billion gallons of water daily, introduce a myriad of toxins into our ecosystems, and offer scant refuge for the local wildlife that once thrived in these spaces,” NWF observes.

Lawns are a major financial investment for many lawn-owners and they are not so easily ditched, but as Carr told CleanTechnica, even a small area reserved to welcome pollinators and other insects can make a contribution. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is one among many resources for getting started.

“Native plants are the ideal choice, because they require less maintenance and tend to be heartier,” USFWS advises. They also note that buying plants from a local nursery gets results much faster than starting from seed, but you’ll need to question your local nurser about the source of their plants. “It’s essential to choose plants that have not been treated with pesticides, insecticides or neonicotinoids,” USFWS explains.

Your local university can also lead you to some good information sources. I randomly checked into the Huck Institute of Life Sciences at Penn State University and found out that it’s a good idea to turn off your outdoor lights at night because they can interfere with normal insect activities after dark such as foraging and courtship (use a motion detector if security is a concern).

No lawn? No problem! Insect conservation organizations like the Xerxes Society are always looking for volunteers and citizen scientists to pitch in with community outreach and other actions.

Another opportunity for habitat restoration is emerging in the emerging field of agrivoltaics, where solar developers are leasing farmland and converting former high-maintenance crops into water-conserving pollinator habitats and native grasslands between the solar panels, so stay tuned for more on that.

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Image (screenshot): The new TV series A Real Bug’s Life peels back the cover on the secret life of insects, including a dramatic never-bef0re-seen Stag Beetle smackdown (courtesy of National Geographic).