Nevada state entomologist says goodbye… for now

A 14-year-old granddaughter will keep him busy. Season tickets to the Wolf Pack will keep him busy. Travel will keep him busy. It’s not like he’s saying goodbye to the beetles and bees and thrips that populate the state. He’s just saying goodbye to his official title as state entomologist.

“Insects have always been intriguing and fun,” Jeff Knight said. “They’re such a diverse group. You always find new stuff, and you’re always seeing new things.”

Knight was nearing 70 years of age when the Appeal interviewed him in the state entomology lab in Sparks on June 24. He’s spent 40 years with the Nevada Department of Agriculture, the majority of those as state entomologist, and he planned to retire July 4. He wanted to keep helping in the lab, post-retirement, on what is a sizeable backlog in bycatch — insects caught while pursuing other species and not yet identified.

To put those efforts in perspective, Knight estimated 5,000-6,000 insect species have been identified and included in the state collection. The state backlog is probably a couple hundred thousand specimens, Knight believed.

Some of the inventory, technically property of the federal government, is from his recent insect “bioblitzes” in Great Basin National Park. Other specimens in the state’s collection date back to the 19th century. The collection also includes insect fossils discovered in Gabbs: encased midges and ants that are 14 million years old.

“If you have it, you got to take care of it,” Knight said of entomology collections in general.

Knight grew up on five acres in Washoe Valley. From an early age, 8 or 9, he would venture into the hills and mountains collecting insects. He worked with the entomology advisor for his local 4-H group on what became a growing taxonomy of bugs.

“I always tell people I had this brief idea of becoming a marine biologist, but I got out on a boat and got very seasick, and that was the end of that,” he said.

Instead of sea legs, Knight opted for beating sheets and blacklights and other instruments to catch insects. He got his general agriculture/pest control degree from UNR and a master’s degree in biology/entomology from Utah State University.

In college, he also met his wife, Virginia, the daughter of Fallon farmers.

“When we were dating, I’d be driving along the road and slam the brake on and jump out to collect something, to look at something, and pretty soon she started doing it,” Knight remembered. “And she’s tolerated — just like my mom did — she tolerated bugs in the freezer.”

By the time Knight landed in the Nevada Department of Agriculture circa 1985, the state entomologist at the time, Robert Bechtel, was planning to retire. Taking up the proverbial mantle, Knight charted his career on the backroads of Nevada.

“Almost every spot in the state — anything with a major dirt road or more,” he said. “It’s taken me everywhere, and it’s been a great job. People don’t ever realize — especially people from out of state — don’t realize how diverse this state is.”

One of his favorite trips was the aforementioned collection in Great Basin National Park.

“That park is very typical of Nevada. You go from very low desert to alpine,” he said.

As mountain islands in the Great Basin can house unique species, so can sand dunes, Knight explained. It was a dune complex, pinkish sand, stretching from Arizona to northeast of Las Vegas where Knight identified the small beetle that now bears his name: aegialia knighti.

This was in the mid-1990s, he said.

“Sand dunes are the same way. They’re biological islands, so you’ll get what we call endemic species or species that only occur in certain areas, in certain dunes,” he said.

Not all his experiences were so wondrous. Part of the job is combating and containing pests. In Northern Nevada, that can mean Mormon crickets. In Southern Nevada, Africanized honeybees, a.k.a. killer bees, have become a problem. The bees have been credited with two human fatalities in Southern Nevada over the last decade, according to Knight.

“Mormon crickets are native. They have been here tens of thousands of years, whereas the Africanized bees came into Nevada in about 1990-91, and they were moving up from South America where they were introduced and escaped,” he said.

Knight noted the arid country between the southern and northern portions of the state has kept the bees, known for aggression, from migrating north of Clark County.

“That’s one of the things we try to warn people. If you’re out hiking in Southern Nevada, and you hear bees, you want to go the other way,” he said. “If you were to go up to a European or normal colony and disturb it, you might have a couple hundred bees come after you, and if you ran just a hundred yards or so, they’d leave you alone.

“Whereas with Africanized honeybees, it’s a couple thousand bees that come after you, and you need to run up to a quarter mile or more to get away from them.”

While Knight acknowledged the importance of pest control, including a national pest survey, he wanted to redirect his attention, post-retirement, to collection, taxonomy and discovery. He said he works with arthropods including spiders, anything without a backbone. He highlighted citizen engagement as well, people submitting photos, information and specimens.

“We don’t have enough eyes and bodies to be out there looking for everything,” he said.

More information is available at agri.nv.gov/plant/report.

The spirit of the unknown remained fascinating to the retiring entomologist. With 5,000-6,000 insect species in the state collection, Knight estimated there are upward of 30,000 insect species in Nevada.

“They (Nevadans) need to understand that really a very, very, very small percentage of insects are really pest insects,” he said. “For the most part, 98 percent or more are either beneficial or don’t cause us any problems, and they are a vital part of everything we do… people tend to think pollination, and they think honeybees, but we have roughly a thousand species of native bees in Nevada, and they’re, in a lot of ways, better pollinators than honeybees.

“We need to look at that and try and figure out how to maintain that diversity of insects, so that we have an environment.”