ByRachel Fobar
Published November 28, 2023
• 6 min read
With its iridescent blue-green exterior and round, expressive eyes, some would call the Miami tiger beetle beautiful.
That’s indeed true. But when photographer Joel Sartore looks at one, he also sees carnage.
“When you zoom in really close,” he says, you see “these big, serrated mandibles that are great at catching and grinding up insects … If we were small enough, that animal would eat us alive and not even feel bad about it.”
He’s not wrong—Miami tiger beetles are named not for their stripes, but from their “highly voracious predatory behaviors,” according to Tiffany Moore, an insect specialist at Zoo Miami. Though these fierce hunters are less than 10 millimeters long, they move fast and ambush their prey—ants, smaller beetles, and other insects. Sartore’s wild-caught subject, which he photographed in a studio at Zoo Miami, darted around so fast, he says he could barely snap an in-focus image. They’re also elusive—originally discovered in the 1930s, the species wasn’t spotted again until 2007, after more than 60 years.
As a result, little is known about this tiny insect, whose only habitat is the pine rocklands of Miami-Dade County, says Ragan Whitlock, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. His organization works to protect the rocklands, an isolated ecosystem under threat from development. As one of the rarest species on Earth, the beetle’s population is likely “exceptionally small,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Miami tiger beetle marks the 15,000th species that Sartore, a National Geographic Explorer, has captured for his Photo Ark project, which aims to document our planet’s rich biodiversity and highlight at-risk species. He started in 2006 with the naked mole rat and has since photographed thousands more, including the Indochinese green magpie, the Arabian cobra, and the güiña, a small spotted cat from South America. (Read how Photo Ark began.)
During the coronavirus pandemic, he began documenting the “brutal world” of insects, He’s since photographed more than a thousand species, but this is the first beetle he’s chosen as a milestone species.
“I learned a lot about [insects] during that time, including the fact that don’t show much mercy to each other.”
A unique ecosystem
Humans haven’t shown much mercy to the tiger beetles either. Their home, the pine rockland forests, once covered more than 186,000 acres in southern Florida, including most of Miami-Dade County, but habitat loss and urbanization have broken it up, causing beetle populations to decline.
Outside the Everglades, the remaining plots are fragmented and overgrown with invasive species. The Miami tiger beetle is just one of the more than three dozen species in danger, including the Florida leafwing butterfly, the Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly, and the Florida bonneted bat that call the pine rocklands home.
The tiger beetles only inhabit two sites within Miami-Dade County, and the largest of the two populations lives on a plot called the Richmond Pine Rocklands. It’s adjacent to the parking lot of Zoo Miami, where developers have proposed building a water park called Miami Wilds. The plan, which has been under discussion for decades, is controversial. The proposed water park overlaps with Miami tiger beetle critical habitat, and as recently as 2021, the beetles have lived on the fringes of this property, according to the local nonprofit the Tropical Audubon Society.
“This is the last great opportunity to have a meaningful chunk of pine rockland and people are still just whacking at it,” says George Gann, the executive director of the Institute for Regional Conservation, a Florida-based nonprofit. “Can we just stop for a minute and be thoughtful?”
Gann, whose work is funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society, is restoring the Richmond Pine Rockland plot, the majority of which is owned by Miami-Dade County. He and his team have spent months setting controlled fires to eliminate overgrown plants, cutting down overly dense pines, and administering herbicide to kill invasive plants. With just a bit more work, “you could have Miami tiger beetles and Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly all over these pinelands.”
Useful beetles
The tiger beetles are an important part of this pine rockland habitat. They help keep the ecosystem in check by eating other insects, and they’re an indicator species, “meaning that their presence is an indicator of favorable habitat, and their absence is an indicator of any disturbances to that habitat,” Whitlock says.
In the U.S. alone, insects, particularly pollinators, contribute about $70 billion a year to the economy.
Sartore hopes that if he brings attention to these and the other species dependent on the pine rocklands, people will be moved to fight for them. “Little bitty animals count as much as the big ones,” he says. “Ants and bees really do allow our world to be habitable.”
Agricultural chemicals and development have led to a massive global insect decline, he says, but individuals can help in simple ways, such as by planting a pollinator garden. “Being a good steward can start as easily as that.” (See nine ways you can help pollinators at home.)
When it comes to the pine rocklands, preserving them comes down to a central question, Sartore says: “Does the public care about all creatures great and small, about the least among us? Do we care, or is development everything?”
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funds the Photo Ark.
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