Wyoming’s Insect Cowboy Has Discovered New Bugs That Are In The Smithsonian

Cowboys traditionally aren’t the biggest fans of most insects because they’re the creepy-crawlies that transmit disease to livestock. The ones that don’t can chow down on their pastures or are just plain annoying.

But Aaron Clark, who lives near Wheatland on the Rabbit Creek Ranch, is an exception to the rule. 

He runs a small cow-calf operation on his ranch, but most of the time you won’t find him roping calves. More often than not, what he’s out in his fields trying to lasso are insects.

Not just any insects, either. He’s after the tiny, seed and milk bugs that most people either ignore or don’t even know exist. 

That’s earned this insect cowboy more than one spot in the Smithsonian Museum’s huge collection, with new ones never before documented in Wyoming or sometimes unknown altogether. 

His finds are on display, along with his collector’s tag, in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History entomology collection, which has more than 35 million specimens from around the world.

That’s one of the largest entomological collections on the planet, but despite that still has many gaps. 

“The biodiversity of the world is under-represented,” Clark told Cowboy State Daily. “And the insects of Wyoming are probably the least well-known in the country. It’s just very poorly known. Nobody works on them here.”

That’s allowed Clark to find a niche working in the sciences, putting his master’s degree in biology to work cataloguing the little-known insects that live in the Cowboy State.

Last Seen In 1892

Among his finds is the rare seed bug called Dycoderus picturatus. 

This little varmint was last seen along the New Mexico-Colorado border in 1892. A Smithsonian researcher on his way to California stepped off a train for a few minutes near Fort Garland. 

“He scoops up some bugs and then goes on to California,” Clark said. “And he finds this bug that hadn’t ever been seen in Colorado.”

There are now just 12 known specimens of D. picturatus in the world, Clark said, almost half of which are insects he found in Wyoming.

“This spring, I was out looking for my bugs, and I caught one,” Clark said. “And I said, ‘This is unbelievable. It’s in Wyoming. (It) hadn’t been seen for over 100 years.'”

Since the insects were a new state record, Clark wrote a paper on the five he found, three of which were female and two male. 

The paper is about the insects’ habitat in Wyoming, including available plants and neighboring bugs, at the location. 

It’s all part of a broader, global effort to discover what insects live where, as well as their role in the overall food web.

Roping Insects

Lassoing a tiny insect isn’t as straightforward as roping a calf.

“You’ve got to literally get in and dig under the roots plants,” Clark said. “And the interesting thing about insects is, you can go and collect a bunch of them, say March 15, and you can go back 10 years consecutively on March 15 and never see another one. 

"It’s just the way insects work. They’ll drive you absolutely bananas.”

A knowledge of their lifestyle habits can be helpful in finding the most elusive ones.

“You know in Wyoming we have wind, right?” Clark said. “So, leeward of every plant, little shrubs, bunch grass, crowns, just anything on the soil, there will always be a pocket of litter, which is decomposed plant material, leeward of every plant in Wyoming.”

That litter is a prime location to look for all kinds of bugs.

“So you go in there very carefully and you deconstruct that litter pocket,” Clark said. “And then we use what are called aspirators, which is just a vial with a suction device attached to it that you can basically collect the insects in that aspirator.”

Not all of the bugs are necessarily in leaf litter though; that’s just one of many spots Clark knows to check in a given area. He’ll also use insect nets to sweep meadows and capture other bugs.

“Many of the insects I’m interested in will overwinter,” Clark said. “And they kind of half-heartedly, what’s called hibernating. It’s a special kind of hibernation that insects do.”

The scientific term for insect hibernation is diapause. It’s a suspension of development, brought on by environmental cues, like shorter days, plants dying back and cooler temperatures. 

Depending on which insect is involved, diapause can take place as eggs, larvae, pupae, or adults, sheltered inside a cavity, beneath some treebank, or snug as a bug in a rug under the earth.

Wherever they are, Clark is always looking, all year long, even in winter. 

The Humidor Corral

To keep his insects safe and sound and healthy while he studies them, Clark needed a special kind of corral, one that maintains a constant temperature and humidity.

He built his bug corral out of an old cigar humidor, which he modified by yanking its guts out and adding his own little heater and humidifier. 

“If you ask my wife, I’m always pulling it apart and putting something else in it,” he said, chuckling a little bit. “But it works pretty good.”

The humidor resides in a back room of the couple’s home that has been entirely devoted to the study of insects. There’s a Smithsonian-style camera setup in the room, along with microscopes and big-screen computer monitors. And there are drawers full of museum-quality specimens, awaiting shipment to their various destinations, as well as a floor-to-ceiling wall of books all about insects.

The humidor allows Clark to rear juvenile bugs, called nymphs, to adulthood, so he can detail the life and times of each bug he finds.

“Some of our insects are parthenogenic, which means they don’t need males to reproduce,” Clark said. “So, you try to tweak that out. You raise nymphs and when you collect them, you make sure they’re all females. Then you put them in another room of their own, to see if they’ll actually reproduce asexually.”

Clark also susses out which plants the insects eat as part of his studies. Often, he finds that each insect is highly dependent on one particular species of plant, rather than being generalists who will just eat anything.

“You have insects whose entire lifestyle cycle is based on one plant,” Clark said. “And finding those and identifying those, I think that’s the interesting part.”

Little work has been done cataloguing which insects feed on which native plants, but most native plants support large numbers of insects, making them important to the overall food web that supports small mammals and birds, on up the food chain to the largest predator species.

“Like rabbit brush, there’s a whole gallery of insects that are dependent entirely on that plant,” Clark said. “So, if the plant crashes, the insects go right with it. And if the insects disappear, then the plant can’t pollinate.”

It’s an interesting cycle, one that makes clear how native species depend on each other.

“Our whole world is tied together in one big knot,” Clark said.

Clark’s Sidekick

Western movies have popularized the idea of the lone cowboy, but, in reality, the best cowboys don’t work alone. They have sidekicks who share the work, so things get done more quickly. 

Clark’s sidekick is a 10-year-old named Allie Hazen who had a little hobby of collecting butterflies.

She was so enthusiastic about it, her parents asked Clark to host her one afternoon on his ranch. Clark was all too happy to show her how to systematically search for and catalog bugs. He even helped her get the right kind of microscope, so she could look at the bugs she finds.

She was such an apt pupil, he even taught her how to correctly catalog a bug for scientific purposes.

Hazen has not only learned how to find and scientifically catalog insects, though. She’ll soon have her very own specimens at the Smithsonian alongside Clark’s. 

Her latest Smithsonian candidate is a stilt bug, whose scientific name is Hoplinus echinatus. Hoplinus seems particularly appropriate, given that Hazen said she saw it “scampering” in the leaf litter of a cinquefoil plant while she was working with Clark this summer.

It’s a tiny bug, smaller than the nail of Hazen’s pinky. She sucked the bug right up into her aspirator, just as Clark had taught her to do, not knowing at the time she was about to add a new record to the bugs of Wyoming.

Hazen likes the study of insects because there are so many different bugs — thousands and thousands of them, each with their own fascinating habits to explore.

She doesn’t know if she’ll grow up to be an entomologist, but if she does, she’s already got some great things on her résumé. 

“Not many kids her age can say they have a bug in the Smithsonian,” Clark said. “I mean that’s a really neat thing.”

Clark has enjoyed encouraging Hazen to explore the world of insects with him on his ranch in Wheatland, Wyoming, where thousands more bugs still await discovery. It’s an endless source of adventure, and more bugs than Clark expects he can find in his lifetime.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.