Stewards Of An Irreplaceable Legacy Entomologists Catalog Hundreds Of Species Alive And Well On Hanford Reservation

From the top of Rattlesnake Ridge, Richard Zack can see out 100 miles and back hundreds of years.

Poking above the clouds and haze to the south and west, there’s Mount Hood and Mount Rainier.

To the north, there’s a virgin plain of bunchgrass and sage little changed from what Washington’s first white settlers found more than a century ago.

But the real insights are closer at hand in the thousands of species of insects flourishing in such an undisturbed environment.

Farming and urbanization have drastically reduced the number and variety of plants and insects throughout Eastern Washington. But here on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation’s 117-square-mile Fitzner/Eberhardt Arid Land Ecology Reserve, Zack and other researchers are cataloguing what the Nature Conservancy has called “an irreplaceable natural legacy.”

“Where you’ll find several hundred species sweeping the grass and the vegetation here, down there you’ll find very few,” said Zack as he pointed to the patchwork quilt of farm fields straddling the Yakima Valley.

In a year and a half, the curator of Washington State University’s entomology museum has netted, grabbed or pinched 35,000 specimens. Enlisting the help of about 50 entomologists around the world, he has identified 800 species and could find another 2,000 species crawling and flying across the site.

Seven species of insects - four leaf hoppers and three bees - are brand new to science. The study also has uncovered two new plant species.

Zack is quick to point out that none of the new insects are the result of the reservation’s plutonium production and radiation research.

“We’re not finding any three-headed ants,” he said.

If radiation were to inadvertently cause an insect to mutate, he said, it would kill it in the process.

Rather, the abundance of insects is testimony to the reserve’s pristine, uncontaminated state.

While parts of the reserve were once grazed, it was closed to the public since 1943 as a security buffer for the nuclear reservation’s closely guarded activities.

Now, the Nature Conservancy has tapped a team of scientists, a $250,000 federal Department of Energy grant and $50,000 in private money to inventory plant communities, rare plants, insects and birds across the reserve. Information from the study eventually will be used to help the Department of Energy decide how the land should be used as it dismantles and cleans up the entire reservation.

Already, the study has bolstered the case for keeping the reserve intact, said Curt Soper, director of agency relations for the conservancy’s Washington office.

“The stuff we’ve been finding is kind of beyond our wildest dreams,” he said. “It shows what the quality of that particular area is compared to the rest of the Columbia Basin.”

Where the casual observer may view the reserve as a brown, monochromatic desert, Zack and other scientists see the high-altitude lichens of Rattlesnake Ridge, pockets of spring-fed greenery and the everchanging blossoms of lupine, larkspur, balsamroot and rabbitbrush.

Because the insect populations can shift in a matter of days, Zack travels the 160 miles from his Moscow, Idaho, home once a week.

Few environments go unchecked. Traveling 20 mph in his Blazer, Zack can spot a darkling beetle crossing the road. Hovering over a single bush for several hours, Zack can collect up to 40 different species.

He will find wasps drawn to the insect carnage on his car grille, bed bugs in a swallows’ nest outside the reserve laboratory and dung beetles in coyote scat - but only if it’s fresh.

The insects are a key element in understanding the region because they are part of an overall picture in which plants are tied to specific insects that in turn are associated with certain birds and mammals.

The region’s size adds to its diversity. Because some insect species will mate on a hilltop and lay eggs in a canyon bottom, they will not be able to survive in places where hills or bottomlands have been developed. But the reserve “is large enough that a number of species can survive here,” said Patti Ensor, the butterfly specialist working on the project.

And because some species are unique to the region, they ultimately could be used as biological controls for insect pests, Zack said. A native ladybird beetle, for instance, could prove to be particularly effective if bred for release in crops plagued by aphids, he said.

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