Chief Insector

THE BALTIMORE CHECKERSPOT, the state butterfly, owes its name to a wing pattern resembling the checkered quadrants of Maryland’s beloved flag. But the orange-and-black beauties lately have struggled to survive.

“If populations keep dwindling, it will be hard to keep calling them the state butterfly,” says Max Ferlauto Ph.D. ’24, who as Maryland’s state entomologist is tasked with conserving all manner of bugs, beetles and butterflies, with particular TLC given to the rarest and most vulnerable insecta. Employed by the Wildlife and Heritage Service, the binocular-carrying Ferlauto travels from Appalachia to the Eastern Shore, quantifying his tiny charges in hopes of preserving them.

The plight of the checkerspot is largely due to deer feasting on its host plant, the white turtlehead flower, leaving the hungry butterflies nowhere to prosper but farther north, where deer populations are less dense. To protect the insect, Ferlauto must first protect the flower.

So he consults a database of Western Marylanders whose wetland properties could grow turtleheads, then calls them, asking to survey and eventually place fencing around the plants in their backyards. “Usually they say, ’Sure, come on by,’” Ferlauto says.

On other days Ferlauto might putter a boat across the Chesapeake Bay to a ribbon of sand that is home to threatened Puritan tiger beetles, which breed on the clay cliffs above. He and a colleague trek across miles of coastline, tallying the bugs one by one. On a given visit, the team might observe up to 200; if the count is too low, it returns with herbicide-spraying drones to clear the cliffs of invasive vegetation.

The diversity of insect species far surpasses mammals’, and for Ferlauto, each one—including native critters like the Sedge leafhopper and Edwards’ hairstreak—plays a vital ecosystem role: Bees pollinate flowers. Flies decompose compost into garden soil. Wasps prey on caterpillars destroying your backyard forsythia.

The entomologist, who is building a habitat on his own property to attract wildlife including reptiles and bats, even defends the much-maligned mosquito, history’s most bloodthirsty killer. “They’re food for dragonflies, which we do like,” he says.