FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A rare flying bug was found in Fayetteville and forgotten for a decade before being rediscovered. The rare Jurassic-era flying insect is called a giant lacewing, and it all started with a quick trip to a Fayetteville Walmart for Michael Skvarla.
“As I walked into the store, there was a large insect on the brickwork next to the door. And I was interested in ant lions at the time and thought, that looks like an ant lion. So I just picked it up between my fingers,” said Michael Skvarla.
Skvarla says he walked through the store with the bug in between his fingers, got what they needed, and his wife drove them home while he was still holding the bug.
“When I got home, I killed it in a kill jar, which is pretty standard for entomology, [a kill jar] is just a jar with acetone to kill the insects. Pinned it up, spread the wings out nicely so you can see all the characters, and then put it in my insect collection and forgot about it for 10 years,” he said.
This was when Skvarla was a Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas. Now he’s an assistant research professor and the Director of the Insect Identification Lab at Penn State.
He was teaching an insect diversity, biodiversity, and taxonomy class over zoom in November 2020, showing his students insects from his own collection under a microscope and talking about characters in the insects when he quickly realized what he thought was an antlion was indeed not.
“I put the specimen aside for about 10 minutes finished teaching class for the day, and then got it back out. I guess they watched me work it out over zoom. And made the discovery there and then in front of them that this was an insect that wasn't ever recorded in Arkansas before,” he said.
In fact, the giant lacewing hadn’t been recorded in the eastern United States in 50 years. He wrote a paper about his discovery knowing it was going to be exciting for fellow entomologists because it’s an important insect discovery, but he had no idea it was going to get the attention he’s seeing now.
“It’s been really heartening because so much of the time dealing in the IID lab people are coming to me with pest insects asking 'how do I kill this thing,' or 'how do I get rid of it'—It's just really nice to see people excited about something because it's exciting and not a pest,” he said.
Skvarla thinks there could be a reproducing population of the giant lacewing in the Ozarks but there is also the possibility that the insect was on a truck from out west and ended up at Walmart.
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