Green Week: Beetlemania

If someone made a bug's life version of "CSI," the American burying beetle would star as the forensic investigator. Say a mouse dies on Block Island. Within an hour, the beetle would be on the case. The only difference between the TV detectives and the Block Island bug is that once the beetle finds the corpse, the show is over and dinner is served. The insect can smell a dead mouse from two miles away. Carrion eaters aren't the most loveable creatures on Earth, but American burying beetles are on the endangered species list, and Block Island is the extent of their range east of the Mississippi, so in one way or another they are the envy of almost every other species of Rhode Islander.

The Roger Williams Park Zoo, as part of its beetle conservation program, breeds them in captivity, monitors them in the wild and even transplants some of the Block Islanders to Nantucket. Zookeeper Lou Perrotti, speaking to me a few years back, admitted that most people think the beetle's stalk-strip-secrete-and-devour approach to dead animals sounds more like a horror show than fine dining, and are skeptical that they're worth saving. "The usual response is, 'You're doing what? Shouldn't you be getting rid of these things?'" Sharon Begley's column in last week's Newsweek quotes Quentin Wheeler, director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University, praising the bug: "Think of the potential if we could mimic that for finding earthquake victims." According to Perrotti, saving, not squashing, the beetle is one of those big-picture deals. "If there were no more insects then life on this planet, including us, wouldn't last a month."