SCARABS Da to smrad, oni volja dogoditi se. Occasional Issue Number 23 Print ISSN 1937-8343 Online ISSN 1937-8351 January, 2008 WITHIN THIS ISSUE ScarabNet – The Scarabaeinae Research ScarabNet Meeting .......... 1 Network 4th Annual Meeting Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Arizona Keeping Color in Areo- dines .................................... 4 by Sacha Spector and Elizabeth Nichols Scarabs Appliqués ............ 5 American Museum of Natural History Central Park West at 79th St. SOLA .................................. 6 New York, NY 10024 [email protected] In Past Years V .................. 9 [email protected] What do you get when you bring 25 dung beetle taxonomists, ecologists, and enthusiasts to a remote field station in Arizona for three days? Why, the fourth annual ScarabNet meeting of course! BACK ISSUES Available At These Sites: As Scarabs readers already know, scarabaeine dung beetles have Coleopterists Society www.coleopsoc.org/de- enormous curb appeal. But if fault.asp?Action=Show_ we needed more reasons to set Resources&ID=Scarabs dung baited pitfalls, dung beetles also hold enormous potential University of Nebraska in the biodiversity conservation www-museum.unl.edu/ research/entomology/ realm, as indicators for ecosystem Scarabs-Newsletter.htm health, as surrogates for other insect groups, and, if nothing else, EDITORS a source of information about Rich Cunningham biodiversity that doesn’t come [email protected] from the “charismatic megafauna” Sacha and Liz preparing for the Barney Streit of big mammals and birds. grueling seven-course pre-meeting barneystreit@hotmail. breakfast that was served each morning. com Begun in 2003, ScarabNet (www.scarabnet.org) is an NSF- Bill Warner [email protected] funded, international network of scarabaeine taxonomists, ecologists information on dung beetles and and conservation biologists working identifying key conservation together to develop the practical science questions that we can and scientific tools necessary to research as a team; support the use of scarabaeine dung • assessing the conservation beetles as an invertebrate focal status of the world’s dung beetle taxon in biodiversity conservation. species using the IUCN’s Red List ScarabNet focuses on cooperatively framework. building a suite of standardized sampling methods, centralized On October 25-27, 25 participants taxonomic resources, and from around the world - Colombia, collaborative research agendas. Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, United Through a combination of annual States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, South Africa, India, and a handful of Arizonans – met for three days of meetings, discussions, and break out sessions. Against a stunning backdrop of fall foliage and the breathtaking Chiricahua mountains, we combined a intense 72 hours of intellectual exercise with a healthy dose of hiking to check our traps and getting sharked by local pool players at the Rodeo Tavern (the only watering hole for 60 miles!). Editors Barney and Bill, and the other participants as well, did Juggling conversations in 5 not get a chance to get to know Liz and Eleanor, since Dave languages, we reviewed the “Dr. Phanaeus” Edmonds always kept a close guard on them. progress made during the past year (lots of updates to the Global meetings and year-round efforts Taxon Database, 3 global ecological by our four working groups, we’re reviews published or in press, new making progress toward: identification keys produced, and the selection of dung beetles as one • designing a standardized, of 7 invertebrate groups included quantitative approach to sampling in the IUCN’s Sampled Red List scarabaeine communities Index) and mapped out strategies worldwide; for taking on new projects in the • developing the ScarabNet coming year. Global Taxon Database – a comprehensive, online We were happy to welcome several clearinghouse for information on new participants, including local the taxonomy of Scarabaeinae, Arizonans Paul Kauffman, Delbert including historical literature, keys LaRue and the nefarious Scarabs to taxa and images of species; editorial team members Bill Page 2 • synthesizing ecological Warner and Barney Streit. Barney Dave Edmonds in turn kept the group humming Federico Escobar along by bringing 23 days worth Toby Gardner of snacks (which paired nicely Bruce Gill with the range of alcohols brought Conrad Gillett from the participants’ respective Paul Kauffman countries and the cookies sent by Frank Krell Teresa Edmonds). Trond Larsen Delbert LaRue We invite Scarabs readers to visit Julio Louzada our website (www.scarabnet.org) to Darren Mann find out more about ScarabNet and Chris Marshall what we do. For more information Olivier Montreuil please feel free to get in touch Liz Nichols with either of us or ask one of your Jorge Noriega colleagues who appears on the list Keith Philips of ScarabNet participants. Pryian Dharma Rajan Paul Schoolmeesters List of participants at the 2007 Eleanor Slade ScarabNet annual meeting: Sacha Spector Barney Streit Chris Borrow Tito Vadurre Adrian Davis Bill Warner The group at the end of the meeting. Page 3 Keeping Color in Areodines by William B. Warner specimens along with wrapping the gutted specimen in layers of paper towel will keep heterosternines from staining as well—I was able to get near “field perfect” color in Heterosternus buprestoides Dupont and Macropoides crassipes Horn with the technique. I had heard via the grapevine that “starvation” also works for Cotalpa, so this year I tried the technique on series of Cotalpa flavida Horn (from Beaver Dam Creek in extreme NW Arizona, April 9), Cotalpa consobrina Horn (from Editor Bill, at the 2004 ESA meeting, Coon’s Bluff along the Salt River in a rare lucid moment, just after the east of Phoenix, Arizona, July 20), caffeine hit. and a singleton of Pseudocotalpa Areodina (especially Cotalpa and giulianii Hardy (sifted from about Pseudocotalpa) normally darken a foot deep beneath the edge of or stain when killed in ethyl a sand paper plant (Petalonyx acetate, alcohols, by freezing, or thurberi) along with two, large even in cyanide jars. I had heard Pseudocotalpa larvae and some about gutting them, and had Aegialia magnifica Gordon & obtained nice specimens in the Cartwright on April 18 at Big past doing this: take a freshly- Dune, Nye Co., Nevada). Basically, killed (or even live) specimen, I put a number of specimens in a lift the elytra, open the abdomen large (~6 liter) plastic container via the tergites and pull out the with holes punched in the lid and intestines with sharp-pointed a large amount of wadded-up forceps, finally “swabbing” out paper toweling to give them an the abdomen with wads of paper absorbent substrate, and ignored towel or tissue paper, and packing them save for replacing the paper the now hollow abdomen with toweling as it became soiled & tissue paper or cotton. This, damp. Those two Cotalpa species however, takes a ton of labor feed voraciously on cottonwood per specimen, in addition to tree (Populus freemontii) leaves, being pretty messy; but it does and produce copious quantities of work well in the field and will wet feces. Within a few days the save valuable specimens from first of the batch started dying, so Page 4 discoloration. Field gutting live I removed and pinned the dead ones (still soft) daily thereafter, resulting in nearly no staining. One negative result is that several of the specimens (perhaps15%) had broken tarsi or missing legs as a result of grappling with others or the substrate, but having fewer near-perfect specimens was much better than having dozens of stained specimens. The single Pseudocotalpa likewise retained its nearly translucent white “fresh” color, but did lose part of the middle tarsi. It also lasted much longer than the Cotalpa spp., no doubt because of its more xeric habitat and that it survives off of fat reserves, apparently not feeding as an adult. I presume this technique Top row: Left- Cotalpa consobrina (kill jar/starved) Middle- Pseudocotalpa giulianii (starved) Right- Cotalpa flavida (kill will work with Heterosternina as jar/starved). Bottom row: Heterosternus buprestoides (kill jar/ well. field gutted while alive). Scarabs Appliqués Scarab enthusiasts who attended the 2007 SOLA meeting were fortunate to be given free iron- on appliqués of the Scarabs newsletter logo. The photo on the left shows our employee Sonja. She wanted to attend the SOLA meeting to hand out the appliqués in person, but we realized that her presence would distract the participants from listening to the speakers. If you do not know about SOLA, kindly turn the page… + Page 5 SOLA by William B. Warner SOLA stands for “The Sacred Order of the Lamellate Antenna.” The concept started as a gag doodle, a sort of scarabaeologists’ coat-of- arms that I had silk-screened onto T-shirts for the 1988 International Congress of Entomology in Vancouver, British Columbia, where it was announced, including the secret “stridulatory greeting.” Miguel-Angel Moron greatly improved my original crest design by hand-painting on his T-shirt; that improved version should have been captured for future use. of putting the symposium together, The concept was generated in the and has done a great (and improved) spirit of building esprit de corps job on it ever since. So put your amongst scarab workers, and all thumbs in your ears, fan your scarab collectors and persons with fingers, tilt your hands alternately up an interest in Scarabaeoidea are and down, and squeak on, dudes! automatically members...whether Celebrities can be they want to be or not. spotted at SOLA meetings. Here is A few years later, I wanted to Doctor Art Evans, start a scarab workers informal Ph.d. at the 2007 meeting, taking a break conference at the Entomological from autographing his Society of America (ESA) meeting, books. and decided the acronym “SOLA” would be fun to include in the symposium name, given it was specifically for scarab workers. The ESA officialdom at the time blessed the (to them unintelligible) acronym, and the ESA SOLA symposium began.