Building a recovery program from scratch across federal, state, academic, and community partners. 2016–2021.
Our work was featured in the NY Times, and NPR.
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pictures, people, and details!
The Client: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (via competitive grants beginning 2015).
The Partners: Numerous federal and state agencies across the Northeast, NGOs, private companies, subcontractors, scientists, artists, landowners, students and volunteers.
The Opportunity. The Puritan tiger beetle (Ellipsoptera puritana), is federally Threatened, state Endangered and reduced to remnant populations in the Connecticut River Valley and Chesapeake Bay. No tiger beetle species had been reared at scale, and no agency had a recovery strategy for tiger beetles.
What ABC Did.
- Secured USFWS funding to launch the program, developed a multi-agency strategy to achieve it, and coordinated multi-year release operations across state and federal partners.
- Designed and custom-built the world’s first laboratory for captive rearing of tiger beetles, repurposing a post-WWII Atlantic salmon hatchery in Sunderland, Massachusetts.
- Directed and scaled the program, including media outreach. Coordinated partners using a Team-of-Teams approach.
Outcome. Hundreds of larvae released across multiple seasons on the Connecticut River augmented, and established new populations. Pioneering program shared publicly in national Tier-1 Media.
ABC is partnered with the Andersen Laboratory at UMass, Amherst, and the UMass Foundation Relations Team, building donor support to climate-proof this species’ presence in New England.
For Projects Like this. ABC builds and runs recovery programs that span federal, state, academic, and community partners.
We’re a good first call when a species needs a recovery program reviewed, revitalized – or created.
* Early support by the Elkinton Lab – made this project possible *
This project constructed the world’s first custom-built lab for rearing tiger beetles. Artist Ariel Martinez poses by the PTB she drew on the lab’s door, greeting every visitor with a view of the lab’s purpose. 2017.
Photographer Sloan Tomlinson shows dorsal, and ventral images of male and female adults used in the rearing program, at left (red paint is used to mark males. And a view of all three larval instars, at right, from larvae reared in the lab. 2018.
The laboratory was repurposed from a 25′ salmon tank (it had a great central drain), in a building built just after WWII as an Atlantic Salmon rearing facility. The lab was bisected with support and storage in the front (picture above), and a SCADA controlled rearing facility in the back.
In the climate controlled rearing section of the lab, mated pairs of PTB were kept in clear containers with petri dishes of sand to oviposit in. Eggs from each pair were collected and counted daily, and placed in individual sand filled tubes to grow as larvae.
Staff and Volunteers collect larvae that were “mass reared” in larger containers. The larvae burrow to the bottom, so containers rapidly overturned were quickly searched for larvae at the top. The remaining sand would be smoothed out, and subsequently checked the next day to find fresh burrows, to collect any larvae missed.
T-shirts. We had t-shirts made in everybody’s favorite color. It was a helluva lot of fun. Art came from the species’ federal recovery plan, and superstar staff member Sara Wisner.
A sweeping view of a beach along the upper Connecticut River in northern Vermont, identified as a likely location to make a new population of PTB.
Cicindela repanda (left), and Ellipsoptera puritana (right, found as recently deceased) shown together during a population survey on the Connecticut River, in western Massachusetts, 2021.