Biosurveillance with the smokey winged beetle bandit wasp: understanding buprestid populations and volunteer outcomes in Minnesota

Abstract

Buprestid beetles can be difficult to sample due to their cryptic nature: larvae are usually wood-boring and feed under bark or within stems, and adults exhibit maturation feeding within tree canopies. There is no long-range sex pheromone identified for this family that could be exploited for sampling. In addition, currently available traps are only intermittently successful at detecting species of interest, including the invasive emerald ash borer, Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire, when at low densities. One method used to sample emerald ash borer and other buprestids is biosurveillance with a native ground-nesting hunting wasp, Cerceris fumipennis Say (Hymenoptera: Crabronidae). Cerceris fumipennis hunts for a wide range of buprestids, does not sting humans, and tends to nest at easily accessible human-disturbed sites such as baseball diamonds, making it easy for non-specialists to monitor nests and collect beetles in their communities. This work utilizes C. fumipennis-collected beetles along with existing museum records to create a checklist of buprestid species in Minnesota, investigates site-level variables that may influence the number and diversity of beetles collected by C. fumipennis, and elucidates individual outcomes for citizen science volunteers who monitor nesting aggregations of C. fumipennis.