Historically, the American burying beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) was found in 35 states, including Missouri, according to Bob Merz, zoological manager for invertebrates at the St. Louis Zoo and director of the Center for Conservation of the American Burying Beetle at the zoo’s Wildcare Institute. It is a partner with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Nature Conservancy in beetle restoration. The last orange-and-black American burying beetle found in Missouri was collected in 1972 in Newton County. By 1989, there were only two known populations of the beetle surviving in the wild, one in Rhode Island and one in Oklahoma. At the time, it was thought that the American burying beetle had experienced “one of the most disastrous declines of an insect’s range ever to be recorded,” according to federal records. That year, it also became one of the first insects added to the federal government’s list of endangered species.
Since that listing, subsequent surveys for the American burying beetle have turned up small but isolated populations in several Midwestern states, including Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, but it is still missing across 90 percent of its former range, which once extended from Florida to Canada and from the Dakotas to Texas.
Source: The Joplin Globe, August 17, 2017
http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/lifestyles/is-american-burying-beetle-r…
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