| PERSPECTIVE |
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[December 4, 2002] -
There's a bug you'll find north of Lincoln, and nowhere else in the world. It's called the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle. It's called one of the rarest insects in North America - and it has conservationists, developers and landowners at odds. Sometime next year the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle will likely earn a spot on the Federal endangered species list. It's likely because another species of Tiger Beetle with numbers 20 times higher than the Salt Creek Beetle is already on the list. That may add to restrictions already existing on the land where the beetles live, and add to the controversy surrounding a bug hardly anyone had heard of 20 years ago. |
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Transcript of Beetle Battle
[Mike Tobias/Reporting]
There's nothing easy, and nothing hi-tech about the way UNL entomologists Steve Spomer and Bill Allgeier track Salt Creek Tiger Beetle populations. They count them, one by one, slogging through the wetlands and creek beds north of Lincoln, not far from Interstate 80.
[Steve Spomer/UNL Entomologist & Bill Allgeier/UNL Entomologist]
Seventeen. How many did you get? Twelve. Twenty-nine, not bad, not bad for this place. You almost had to throw me a rope (laughs).
[Tobias]
The Salt Creek Tiger Beetle was discovered, but mostly forgotten, about 100 years ago. Spomer first heard of it in 1984. A butterfly researcher by trade, the rare beetle soon became his hobby.
[Spomer]
This isn't part of my job description, actually. I just started to do this because I felt it was important and we had an insect that was named after Lincoln and I wanted to find out more about it.
[Tobias]
Allgeier was an auto industry executive in Michigan. He traded his suit and tie for rubber boots to go back to grad school and work with the rare beetles.
[Allgeier]
Trying to figure out exactly why this beetle is so restricted is most interesting, and is really what's stimulated a lot of my research.
[Tobias]
They counted nearly 800 in June and July. That's the only time the Salt Creek Tiger Beetles are around - the adults only live for about six weeks. Researchers think the insect has a two-year lifecycle. It lays eggs in the soil. The larval hatches and digs a burrow it lives in until adulthood.
[Spomer]
Basically what it does is just sits there and waits for movement or a shadow to pass over the burrow, or they can feel the movements of an insect walking up there. They'll go up and grab the insect, even if it's bigger than themselves, and they'll try to pull it back down into the burrow where they eat it.
[Tobias]
Spomer and Allgeier spot the adults by looking for their unique behavior.
[Spomer]
The Salt Creek Tiger Beetle is usually by the edge of the water, so it will run along the edge of the water, looking for shoreflies or maggots, any kind of insect to feed on. But they'll take these little bursts, where they'll go about six inches at a time. So they've got what I call a nervous behavior.
[Tobias]
They're named for the Little Salt Creek. This is their habitat, along with the nearby saline marshes. It's also home to a rare small plant called the Salt Wort.
[Spomer]
If you break off a little piece and chew it, you can taste the salt in it. It's one of the few plants that can live in a really salty environment like this.
[Tobias]
The Salt Wort and Salt Creek Tiger Beetle are on Nebraska's endangered species list. Spomer thinks that because this saline wetlands is so unique, there may be other rare species. He's also concerned this may disappear, as Lincoln rapidly grows to the north.
[Spomer]
You know, you hear a lot of comments about, why should we save the beetle and these people should be worrying about something more important. But to me it is important. I mean this habitat is almost gone now. If we plow over it or build houses here, that's it. It's never going to come back.
[Tobias]
That hasn't happened, yet. But large-scale development is closing in. A proposed 600-acre industrial and residential housing project would sit just south of the wetlands.
[Tobias]
There has to be some significant pressure from people who do want to develop out in that area?
[Mike DeKalb/Lancaster County Planner]
Yeah, there is. We're trying to find a balance between human development, and activities of man, and the natural environment and nature.
[Tobias]
The beetles and their home already have some city and state protection. Local officials put a 500-foot buffer zone around the wetlands to slow development.
[DeKalb]
On the city side, what it amounts to is until we get more information we're not going to extend water lines and sewer lines and the infrastructure and the roads to allow the city to grow in that direction and this time.
[Tobias]
The state endangered species designation means it's against the law to kill or harm a listed species. It also calls for an environmental review of anything the state is involved in around the area.
[Rick Schneider/NE Game and Parks Commission]
All state agencies are required to insure that any action that they either conduct, fund or authorize does not imperil or further jeopardize an endangered species.
[Tobias]
This could include a road project, or something an individual landowner is doing that requires a state permit. The Federal Endangered Species designation that's pending would add similar protection for the beetle and oversight of projects involving federal funds. It could also mean funding for habitat recovery plans. Area landowners say the government, at any level, is putting bugs ahead of people.
[Doug Nagel/Davey]
In my opinion this beetle is not a prolific animal and I think its already going endangered on its own.
[Tobias]
Doug Nagel is a regular at meetings like this University-sponsored seminar on the Tiger Beetle. Nagel's farmed near the beetle habitat for 13 years. He heads a group of 32 local landowners called North Lancaster County Citizens for Common Sense Development. They formed to fight restrictions on land use.
[Nagel]
To me I wonder where on earth we're going to draw the line on all this protection for less than 1000 beetles.
[Tobias]
Nagel has no plans to sell his land, for now. But he's concerned restrictions on land use could reduce his options and pocketbook in the future.
[Nagel]
Maybe 5, 10, 15 years from now it would be a no brainer to sell it because, not to sound greedy or anything, but it will produce a lot of income for us. That being said, the other thing that it will do is allow us to buy farm ground somewhere else so I can keep my heredity in farming and agriculture going.
[Tobias]
Mel King's roots have been in this land all his life - he played along the banks of Little Salt Creek as a boy. Now he owns and rents out farmland that runs right up to the creek - inside the buffer zone.
[Mel King/Lincoln]
I'm willing to go along and set a reasonable amount of land aside for the tiger beetle and the wetlands, but I'm a little afraid the conservationists and the Game and Parks are going a little bit overboard.
[Tobias]
King's worried about how farm operations might be hurt by a Federal designation.
[King]
It would probably limit where we could cultivate and it would limit what chemicals we could put on. We've had some problems with corn borers and so on this year, that I would imagine that they would say hey, you can't spray for those, you're libel to kill one of the salt beetles.
[Tobias]
King and Nagel both say landowners have been good stewards of the beetle habitat - without the government telling them how. King built a diversion dam to keep runoff water from his land out of Salt Creek, and hasn't planted on land right next to the creek to preserve its natural state. Nagel believes conservation-minded farmers may have actually kept the wetlands from disappearing.
[Nagel]
Through our hard work and efforts to save the area, we're probably getting punished by it.
[King]
I'm certainly glad that the conservationists and the Game Commission weren't around here when the dinosaurs were here. We'd be up to our eyeballs in dinosaurs.
[Tobias]
This summer Bill Allgeier was up to his eyeballs in Salt Creek Tiger Beetle larvae. He set traps along the creek to find out why female beetles lay eggs in certain places.
[Allgeier]
Currently I have 123 traps, and with the emergence traps I have to feed the larvals about every three days, so it becomes pretty labor intensive. It's almost like having 123 children out here.
[Tobias]
Allgeier's trying to answer some of the many questions about his adopted children, and their unique home. The lack of information about Salt Creek Tiger Beetles is part of the problem. No one knows for certain how they'll be effected by development of any kind. Or whether a solution can be crafted that makes everyone happy, including a few hundred nervous bugs. Reporting for Statewide, I'm Mike Tobias.