Locust (32 page)

A few minutes later he came trudging up, shaking his head. “You never saw it, did you?” he asked.

My pithy reply, “Saw what?” answered his question.

“I wasn’t waving at you, I was warning you that a rock had broken loose.”

He had watched in horror as the stone, the size of a cooler, careened down the slope toward me but out of my line of sight. Having yelled my reply to him, I’d never heard it coming, and it had passed behind me before I knew it was there. “It couldn’t have missed you by more than ten feet,” he said. This was probably our closest brush with death in what was to be five years of expeditions.

After a lunch of dried apples, beef jerky, crackers, and M&Ms we went back to work, mucking rotten grasshoppers from the surface of the ice. We could find no whole bodies, but there were clumps of jumbled, decomposing corpses. In mats a couple inches thick and several square yards in area, the remains were like soggy peat moss—black, tangled masses of organic material. Amid the soft matrix, we could readily discern scraps of wings and broken legs. The most numerous parts were tiny jet-black mandibles, the hardest body parts of a grasshopper but no larger than a typewritten
v
. There was another part in abundance, but for all our combined entomological expertise, we didn’t positively identify these until we returned to the laboratory. About the same size and shape as a typewritten
H,
these were fragments of the
tentorium
. Relying on a hardened shell-like cuticle for protection and support, insects don’t have an internal skeleton. However, the pressures that are generated by the powerful muscles controlling the grasshopper’s mandibles would collapse their heads without internal support. And so, the exoskeleton is involuted and forms bracing within the head; this support structure is called the tentorium.
Most of the thin cuticle covering the body had been reduced to indistinguishable bits, littered throughout the soft, rotting tissues.

On our last day at the glacier, we scraped up as much soggy grasshopper gunk as we could from the patches that had surfaced. Then, Dick took charge of digging a series of three-foot-deep pits in search of embedded layers, for which he was rewarded with an exceptionally aerobic workout but no specimens. On the way back to camp, we hauled out nearly a hundred pounds of slushy organic debris. Larry, the workhorse of the team, carried half the load. Dick and I split the remaining Ziplock bags, as Tim’s energy was clearly ebbing. A diet of rehydrated foods, long hikes over shifting rock, cold nights on a lumpy meadow, and hard labor at more than two miles above sea level had taken their toll. After dinner that evening, Dick cleared his throat, pulled out a sample bottle of meltwater that he’d hauled down from the glacier, and with a grand flourish poured the contents into a flask that he extracted from one of the food boxes.

“To us!” he declared passing the concoction to me, “Twenty-year-old scotch and thousand-year old water—a fitting close to a successful expedition.”

Back in Cooke City, I was stretched out on a hotel bed after a luxuriously hot shower when Dick pounded on my door. “Check this out,” he said, handing me a black-and-white photograph. He’d met up with a local couple, Frank and Roberta Williams, who had lent him their family treasure—a photograph of the face of Grasshopper Glacier from 1900. This image was fully forty years earlier than any previous record of the glacier’s condition, and the implications were staggering. It was no wonder we’d found only decomposing remains of the locusts; in just a hundred years the glacier had dwindled to less than a twentieth of its past expanse. Where we had encountered a twenty-five-acre lake lapping at the toe of the glacier, there had once been an eighty-foot wall of ice towering over a small pond.

 

After returning to the laboratory, we dried the masses of debris and discovered that more than 90 percent of the sample was water, leaving us with less than a pound of material. And of this, a scant 2 percent was readily identifiable grasshopper remains—the rest being
windblown dust, pebbles, and pulverized soft tissues of the insects. In a single glass flask we had some of the most valuable material ever mined from nature. With this jumble of dried grasshopper parts weighing in at about a quarter of an ounce, the cost of the flask’s contents worked out to nearly $30,000 a pound. But we had enough pieces to conduct radiocarbon dating, which placed the time of the locusts’ deposition at 800 years before the present. When medieval knights were jousting in Europe, a swarm of locusts had been swept up the valley and blown onto the ice. But could we be certain that these were the remains of the infamous Rocky Mountain locust?

Embedded within the contorted genitals of male grasshoppers are some hardened structures. When a grasshopper decays, the soft tissues rot and leave behind these oddly shaped pieces, a bit like the disarticulated skeletal remains that persist after a corpse decomposes. From these diagnostic structures, we knew that the remains belonged to the genus
Melanoplus—
and most likely to either
sanguinipes
or
spretus
. Based on a few hundred measurements of legs, wings, and other identifiable remains, the statistical balance tipped in favor of
spretus
. But without whole bodies from which intact genitalia could be studied, the identification could not be definitive. Moreover, the condition of the remains was such that there was little biological evidence that could be gleaned in terms of genetic or other molecular analyses.

 

Perhaps our scotch-and-water toast to “success” had been a bit premature. I had, however, learned a great deal about glacial prospecting for locusts. First, it was clear that, as we had suspected, this resource was rapidly disappearing. Indeed, we guessed that the exposed debris was the last of the preserved swarms. Our conjecture was based on having found no deeper layers of locusts and the fact that our radiocarbon dates were at the outer limits of those that Ashley Gurney had reported for the deep layers exposed at the foot of the glacier in 1952. If we were going to find well-preserved specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust, the clock was ticking and every passing summer meant that valuable material was rotting from the melting glaciers of the West.

Next, I had figured out what pieces of equipment and which supplies were actually needed for such ventures. Future trips would require
far more lean and efficient logistics. Other sites were even less accessible, and the luxury of hauling gear in a truck was not likely to be repeated. Rather, we’d be backpacking a week’s worth of scientific and camp supplies into a remote site.

I also realized that a tremendous investment of resources and time could be negated by the vagaries of weather. We’d been lucky to have only a light snow, which melted within a day or two. But if a foot of snow had fallen, then we’d never have had a chance to see the surface of the glacier or find deposits of preserved insects. In these mountains, the time between the final melt of one spring’s snow and the first coating of the next autumn can be a matter of days. In some years the window is entirely closed. It was also clear that hauling a hundred pounds of slush to extract a few grams of locust parts was brutally inefficient. We had to find a method of extracting the needle without carrying the haystack back to the laboratory.

In light of the first expedition’s qualified success—we had, after all, managed to recover remains of what appeared to be the Rocky Mountain locust—I immediately sought funding for the next expedition. My contention was that we had to act quickly because an irreplaceable natural resource was melting from under us. A Cooke City resident told us of having seen whole bodies of locusts on the glacier just six years before our work. A review of various geological reports revealed that there were other glaciers in the Rocky Mountains that contained the remains of grasshoppers (or locusts), and because of their high elevations and northern exposures they had a good chance of still containing well-preserved specimens.

I gambled that this sense of urgency would parlay into funding. I lost the bet. Reviewers latched onto the rotten state of affairs at Grasshopper Glacier instead of the possibility that other sites would be in better condition. Rather than interpreting our findings as cause for an emergency intervention to preserve a dwindling resource, my colleagues took the proposal as an obituary. Once again, I had to beg for some meager funding from my own institution, rather than partake of the riches of the National Science Foundation. However, my harshest lesson came when we attempted to publish our findings from this first expedition.

In 1988, we submitted a paper describing what we had found, including the condition of the glacier, the location of deposits, the types of insect parts we had extracted, the radiocarbon dating, and the analyses that had led us to believe we had recovered the remains of the Rocky Mountain locust. As it was the first report of such a study in nearly fifty years, we hoped that the manuscript would be well received. It was rejected. The editor of
Environmental Entomology
at that time explained that the study did not constitute a controlled experiment. I wondered where we were supposed to find a “control glacier” and what experiment could have been done if we had located such a resource. My written appeal to the editorial board—the only time I have ever been brazen enough to take such a step—was denied with the incisive summary, “You have mistaken natural history for science.” It seems that replication, statistical design, and controlled experimentation defined science, at least at that time, for the entomological community. This view suggested that initiatives such as the Human Genome Project (decidedly lacking a clear hypothesis), the entire field of cosmology (there is, after all, only one universe), and entire projects devoted to unreplicated discovery (NASA’s deep space probes) were not science. It was as if nothing of value was left to describe in the natural world—a remarkable position for entomology, a field in which no more than a tenth of the fundamental units of study (insect species) are even known.

Still more disturbing was the notion that science required manipulation of the natural world, rather than patient observation or thoughtful description. The Rocky Mountain locust was gone, and no experiment will ever show the course of events that led to its demise, explain the role it played in western ecosystems, or reveal what other species may have perished along with it. Its tale would be told, if at all, to those willing to listen rather than to those demanding answers. In the end, the paper was published in
American Entomologist
—a semipopular journal without the technical rigor and prestigious status of
Environmental Entomology—
and I received more reprint requests for it than I have for any paper that involved a controlled experiment. Maybe this response was because I do not develop very interesting experiments, or perhaps because even scientists
find value in stories and marvel at the tale of the Rocky Mountain locust.

Most important, this conflict solidified in me a personal passion to find unimpeachable evidence of glacially preserved Rocky Mountain locusts, to bring back a whole body of this magnificent creature to prove that my idea of their having been preserved somewhere among the peaks of their homeland was not a quixotic flight of fancy. I bridled at my colleagues’ suggestions that the search for the last bodies of
spretus
was in vain. I was thirty years old and still had the belligerent defiance of my youth—a quality that was both a wellspring of internal drive and an occasional source of unnecessary conflict. I could appreciate Riley’s passion and for me, nothing was so motivating as to be doubted, even mocked (as would happen in later reviews of my work). The gauntlet had been thrown down, and my expeditions to the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains became a search for a lost locust—and for professional pride.

 

A quarter mile into the hike and I was dying. “This is going to hurt,” I gasped. “A whole lot,” Dick wheezed. Even Larry had dropped to his knees. The new guy on the team, Jeff Burne, a wiry faculty colleague in entomology, had the look of a man who had been duped. “If we have another five or six miles of this, it’s going to be a long day,” he offered. The map hadn’t shown such a brutal ascent. The prospect of carrying seventy-pound packs up the Cottonwood Creek drainage leading to this Grasshopper Glacier was increasingly daunting. I reflected on the irony of this glacier’s being situated in Montana’s Crazy Mountains. We had to be insane to attempt this hike fully loaded with a week’s provisions and all of our collecting and climbing equipment.

According to a twenty-five-year-old geological report, this glacier was supposed to contain plenty of grasshoppers. No entomologist had seen this site, and the geologists who had filed the report were clearly more interested in bringing back rocks than insects. So the identity of the grasshoppers was anyone’s guess. Although the elevation was lower than that of our first glacier, the topographic maps showed that this body of ice had a strong northward aspect. I hoped that this protection from the sun’s rays had delayed recession, leaving some
grasshoppers—perhaps the Rocky Mountain locust—well preserved. My plan had all the makings of success, or so it seemed to me: The glacier was well situated and known to contain grasshoppers; the weather in August of 1988 was warm and dry; and the planning and packing had proceeded flawlessly. The only glitch was that the map had indicated a climb of perhaps a thousand feet spread over several miles, not a thigh-burning struggle up a wicked slope.

We shouldered our packs and headed up the hillside, hoping to find that hypnotic hiking rhythm that allows a certain detachment of mind and body during long, hard treks. Much to our delight, within another few hundred yards the trail leveled off to a relatively mild grade, following the creek bottom. For the rest of the morning, we walked easily and managed to joke about our personal misgivings at the start of the day’s hike. By noon we had arrived at Cottonwood Lake, fed by the clear glacial runoff from Grasshopper Glacier. From camp we could look across an alpine meadow to an immense terminal moraine, a pile of rock a half mile wide and 200 feet high that the glacier had pushed down the valley, marking its furthest advance. Somewhere behind this bulwark of stone lay the glacier and its frozen contents.