CHRIS: Welcome to the Oregon State Arthropod Collection.

NARRATOR: Some people are afraid of bugs but Chris Marshall has been fascinated by them since he was a boy.

CHRIS: This is a type of wasp here, the Pompilidae, the spider hawks and tarantula hawks.

NARRATOR: He curates Oregon State University's Arthropod Collection.

We have probably 800,000 specimens of different beetles.

It is the largest repository of Pacific Northwest insects in the world.

NARRATOR: In total, there are some three million specimens from around the globe.

They range from beautiful butterflies to the hideous botfly.

I had one that developed in my arm when I was a graduate student and I was kind of a celebrity for the students at Cornell who watched it developed in my arm for about six to eight weeks before it finally emerged.

Won't be doing that again.

[laughs] NARRATOR: But of them all, the beetles are Chris's true love.

So here we have some metallic wood-boring beetles, the family Buprestidae, what we call eye candy or sometimes they're called oh my beetles where we pull out the drawer and people just find them breathtakingly beautiful.

NARRATOR: It's beauty that comes in all shapes and sizes, from the aptly named titan beetle or Titanus giganteus to the dainty featherwing beetle.

They're even smaller than a pinhead.

They're the little dot at the end of the triangle.

The size difference between this beetle and the Titanus giganteus, there's nothing comparable in the vertebrate system.

I mean, even comparing us to the blue whale, this is orders of magnitude larger size variation.

These are all males.

NARRATOR: Chris has spent his life hunting beetles, which is why he got excited when he received a curious photo.

This particular hunt began with a gentleman in Goldendale who had found rain beetles flying on his property and thought they were, wanted to know what they were.

NARRATOR: The thing about rain beetles, or Pleocomidae, is they spend their whole lives underground.

They generally only emerge during fall's first big rains when they come out to mate, thus the name rain beetle.

In fact, there was a push in the '70s to make them the Oregon state insect.

But it was beaten out by a much more beautiful, to some people, insect which is the Oregon swallowtail, which is still a great state insect.

I'm not going to play favorites.

NARRATOR: Rain beetles aren't well known across the Gorge in Washington, which was what initially pinged Chris's attention about the picture from Goldendale.

But the really odd thing was that these beetles were out mating in the spring after the snow melted as opposed to mating in the fall like the Oregon beetles.

So Chris wondered, "Could they be a new species?"

To find out, he would need to gather specimens.

That's a good dog.

Yeah, look for some bugs, yeah.

NARRATOR: Mike McBride has lived outside Goldendale for nearly 30 years and most every morning, he heads out for a walk with his dog, Laker.

We walk down around through the woods.

She wants to go out and do her thing and one of her things in the morning is, "I'm gonna look for beetles."

NARRATOR: Mike wanted to know what they were, which lead him to send the photo to Chris.

So on a chill March morning, Chris and his assistant arrive in search of their fleeting quarry.

MIKE: Laker, let's find a bug.

Let's find a bug.

NARRATOR: With Laker leading the way, the hunt is on.

MIKE: Right over here, right there.

NARRATOR: Generally, rain beetles emerge and take flight before dawn, but this morning, there are none to be seen.

CHRIS: So were you digging here or was that someone else?

No, that's her, that's her.

She smells them and she starts digging.

NARRATOR: After a half hour of searching for small beetle holes, they make their first discovery.

MIKE: Now, there's a fresh one.

Let's see here.

Oh, so there we go.

So that's the, let's see if that's the male or the female.

That's the female, I think.

Oh, wait, no.

Nope, that's the male.

Let's try another one, keep looking for the female.

NARRATOR: Chris needs both male and female specimens to determine if they're a new species, but while the males take flight in their search for mates, the females play coy.

So the female comes up to the surface and all she ever does is she just puts her abdomen at the edge of the hole and releases a pheromone and the males come in.

NARRATOR: They follow Laker deeper into the forest.

Laker, come on back here.

Come here.

Come on, baby.

You can see this was all eight, nine inches of snow a little over a week ago.

CHRIS: They're waiting right under that snow and then as soon as the snowmelt comes, they're tunneling up to the surface.

NARRATOR: They run through the process at every small hole: shovel, dig, sift, repeat.

They find a few more males but no females.

CHRIS: I feel like I'm late to the party.

NARRATOR: As the morning drags on, their hope is vanishing and they decide to head back to Mike's house.

Turns out sometimes you're better off not leaving the backyard at all.

MIKE: Ah, right here.

There it is.

That's a female?

Yeah.

MIKE: Oh, wow.

NARRATOR: They finally find their female.

And then they make another cool discovery.

CHRIS: Oh, wow, so that's the larva.

NARRATOR: Chris needs the larva because they could hold the secret to how long this species of rain beetle lives.

A lot of these rain beetles can be eight or 15 years old before they emerge.

MIKE: Before they come out of the ground.

Right, and so that's very unusual for insects.

NARRATOR: It's easy to think that we must know everything there is to know about anything bigger than a flea.

I think that large elements of our biodiversity are big and showy and quite common and abundant and we do know those species pretty well so it creates a sort of a mirage in one regard that everything's known.

NARRATOR: But when it comes to many organisms like rain beetles, we don't even know simple things, such as their lifespan or daily routine.

This species is also typical of many things we don't know much about because most of the year it's underground.

We don't notice it.

We notice it when we see them flying for a few days during the spring or the fall when they're having a mating cycle and the chances that someone's gonna be walking by them during the three days of the year when they're visible on the surface is pretty small.

NARRATOR: Chris seeks out these elusive creatures.

In the mountains of Oregon, he and a colleague identified several new species of another hard-to-find critter, the ice crawler.

There he is.

He's got sugars and things in his blood that keep him able to move even though he's right at around zero 'cause he's walking on this ice, this snow.

They actually start to slow down when they get a little too warm.

NARRATOR: Chris has learned that to find something new, you have to stay up later, hike up higher, or dig a little deeper.

If you go out into any part of Oregon and you start really probing and looking at the animals and plants that live there, you'll realize that there's a lot more that isn't known, which means there's always something that you can add.

Her position's not right.

NARRATOR: Back in the lab, the first step is to document the Goldendale specimens for publication.

What I'm trying to do here is to get photographs of the species that are a little more natural looking than would be a photograph of a pinned museum specimen.

I think it helps people get excited about these species and it's how they're gonna probably see them in the wild.

NARRATOR: As he takes the pictures, Chris discovers a hitchhiker that he can't find in the scientific literature.

You can see the mite right there.

This is a great example how when you start to look at biodiversity, it's kind of like a, in some regard, it's like a fractal.

The more you look, the more complicated it gets.

So this could be another undescribed species that has an undescribed fauna associated with it.

NARRATOR: The next step is to compare the new Goldendale specimens to the closest known species, Pleocoma crinita, which lives across the Columbia around Hood River.

CHRIS: Huh, interesting.

So some are furry and a few aren't.

I wonder why that is.

NARRATOR: For species that live so close together, it often takes dissections and looking at DNA to identify clear differences.

It's a lucky day if they're visible under a microscope.

What we see here when we finally have a chance to look at them all in comparison, they're very easy to tell apart.

The Hood River population is incredibly furry, whereas the Goldendale looked very different.

So the preponderance of evidence is becoming clear that these populations are really distinct.

Totally, totally cool.

NARRATOR: This is what scientific discovery looks like, days spent in the field the old-fashioned way with shovels and nets, followed by months in the lab.

Chris still has to look at the DNA to be certain this is a new species, but if it is, it's one more piece towards understanding the puzzle of life around us.

It's so exhilarating to, in some regards, plant a flag in the knowledge base of mankind.

I think finding out new things is part of what it is to be human.

It's just exciting.