For the first time in more than 50 years, a giant lacewing has been found (Polystoechotes punctata) in eastern North America. The discovery raises new questions about the distribution of this Jurassic insect that mysteriously disappeared from the eastern coast decades ago.
A possible anthill
The giant lacewing was once abundant throughout North America, but in the 1800s the eastern population of the insect began to plummet for unknown reasons, possibly due to increased urban development, invasive species, and artificial light. Giant lacewings had never before been documented in Arkansas, so when Penn State University’s Penn State University saw an unusual insect about 50 millimeters in wingspan on the front of his local Walmart, he assumed it belonged to a more common group of insects called anthill.
“I picked it up and walked around the store with it between my fingers while I was shopping and checking out, and then I held it all the way home,” says Skvarla, who was a doctoral student when she found the insect in Fayetteville. , Arkansas, in 2012. Skvarla kept it in hopes of taking a closer look, but the insect was in storage for nearly a decade before he re-examined it.
He didn’t make the revelation until 2020, while teaching a university course on insect identification via video stream. She took specimens of anthills from her personal collection as teaching materials and examined them with a microscope connected to her computer. “I quickly realized that it was not an anthill,” says Skvarla, who noticed an unusually high number of veins on the wings.
It was a giant lacewing
Later in the lab, Skvarla tried but failed to extract DNA from the lacewing’s leg, which could have helped determine its population of origin: whether it was an interloper from the west or whether it came from an eastern population.
Skvarla suspects that his lacewing was a member of a relict population that has managed to maintain itself, possibly in the nearby Ozarks. The discovery of this giant lacewing “suggests that other small populations of the insect are likely to exist in eastern forested areas,” says the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Locating the insect in a suburban area also demonstrates the adaptability of the species, which has lived through the extinction of the dinosaurs and the industrial revolution, says the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “Some individuals have found a way to cling, like this intrepid lacewing did outside a Walmart.”