Butterfly Hunt Finds Some 700 Species

G A T L I N B U R G, Tenn., Aug. 28, 2000 -- In one sweeping 24-hour period, a teamof top biologists collected and identified 706 species of moths andbutterflies in the Great Smoky Mountains.

The scientists estimated there could be hundreds more stilluncounted.

The so-called All Taxa-Biodiversity Inventory in the Smokies — ascientific enterprise never completed anywhere else on the planet —so far has found everything from new salamanders to earthworms measuring 18 inches in length.

It is just the most recent contribution to a massive effortbegun in 1998 to catalog every plant and animal in thehalf-million-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“I think we have every reason to be very, very happy with whatwe were able to accomplish,” an exhausted David Wagner of theUniversity of Connecticut told 20 experts he brought here fromaround the country. “This has never been done on this scalebefore.”

Knowing What’s Out There

Most of the plants and mammals are known in the 60-year-old parkon the Tennessee-North Carolina border. So scientists haveconcentrated, in their own specialties, on smaller species — deermice, algae, fungi and flies, so far.

“If one purpose of our national parks is to protectbiodiversity and our natural resources, we need to know what theyare and where they are,” said Brian Scholtens, a College ofCharleston professor and coordinator for the study’s umbrellaorganization, Discover Life in America.

“This is a start, in one park, to know what is in it,” hesaid.

The National Park Service hopes the Smokies study, which couldtake up to 15 years to complete, will become a model for otherparks.

“We are still in what we call the pilot years,” Smokiesentomologist Becky Nichols said. “We are still getting some of theprotocols ironed out.”

The value of the undertaking is providing park officials withthe information to gauge and manage the health of the habitat.

Wagner recently convinced fellow members of the LepidopteristsSociety — a group that studies moths and butterflies — to take adetour from their annual convention at Wake Forest University totake part in the one-day “bioblast” roundup in the Smokies.

The group included experts from the Smithsonian Institution, theU.S. Department of Agriculture, Chicago’s Field Museum, the NatureConservancy and the University of California at Berkeley.

Search by Day and Night

By day they identified butterflies by sight, Nichols said. Bynight, they set blacklight traps to lure in the moths.

One day, they poured over long tables covered with neatlyorganized piles of small winged creatures. They called outscientific names as they recognized them, kept a running list andmade bets on how many they would find.

The informal list of moths and butterflies that have beenreported in the park since its beginning contained about 800 names.

Wagner’s group found 706 over one day. Considering the brieftime for collection, the scientists estimated there are at least3,000 moths and butterflies in the park.

“There is a tremendous number of uncounted species,” Wagnersaid, noting that the researchers will continue theiridentification work back at their labs. “So this number will donothing but grow over the next two to three months.”

Thirty of the species were butterflies, and all were previouslyknown. The rest were moths, ranging in size from a few millimetersto nearly five inches at the wingtips.

Species Without Names

The scientists found 11 families of moths with 50 identifiedspecies that had never been seen before in the park, including atleast one European native, and 25 species that had never beenformally named anywhere.

A key find was a ghost moth, a dark brown insect about the sizeof a quarter. Several were found on Clingmans Dome — the highestpeak in the Smokies. Wagner said the moth has been seen in only twoother places — in the mountains of West Virginia and atop Mt.Mitchell in North Carolina.

The ghost moth may deserve protection because its habitat isthreatened by global warming, air pollution besetting the Smokiesand the effects of a nonnative insect that is killing off thepark’s last major stands of Fraser fir trees on Clingmans Dome,Wagner said.

“The first part of conservation is finding out what is there,and that is what this nature quest is really about,” Wagner said.“You can’t protect what you don’t know about.”