The recently-identified giant lacewing is an insect that was once widespread across North America until it went extinct by the 1950s. But in 2012, an entomologist named Michael Skvarla went to a Walmart in Fayetteville, Arkansas to pick up milk. On his way into the store he noticed a strange looking insect on the side of the building.
Skvarla, who was a doctoral student at the time, believed it to be some kind of common flying insect, however he noticed its massive size and collected the insect.
“I remember it vividly because I was walking into Walmart to get milk and I saw this huge insect on the side of the building,” said Skvarla, who is now the director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab.
“I thought it looked interesting, so I put it in my hand and did the rest of my shopping with it between my fingers. I got home, mounted it, and promptly forgot about it for almost a decade.”
Later, when Skvarla began teaching an online course during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to use his personal insect collection for his curriculum. While teaching, the academic found that his 2012 Walmart insect looked more like a lacewing than an antlion---but this lacewing had a wingspan of a massive two inches.
“We were watching what Dr. Skvarla saw under his microscope and he’s talking about the features and then just kinda stops,” Codey Mathis, a doctoral candidate in entomology at Penn State, said.
“We all realized together that the insect was not what it was labeled and was in fact a super-rare giant lacewing. I still remember the feeling. It was so gratifying to know that the excitement doesn’t dim, the wonder isn’t lost. Here we were making a true discovery in the middle of an online lab course.”
Skvarla and his colleagues at the university then performed molecular DNA analysis on the insect. Fayetteville, where the Walmart bug was found, lies in the Ozark Mountains, an area which suspected to be a hotspot for biodiversity.
According to Skvarla, the area, which hosts dozens of endemic species, is also understudied compared to other areas with a similar biodiversity such as the Southern Appalachians.
“This combination makes the region an ideal place for a large, showy insect to hide undetected,” wrote Skvarla and J. Ray Fisher of the Mississippi Entomological Museum at Mississippi State University, the co-author of his paper.
"It could have been 100 years since it was even in this area—and it's been years since it's been spotted anywhere near it. The next closest place that they've been found was 1,200 miles away, so very unlikely it would have traveled that far,” Skvarla said of its discovered location at a Walmart in Fayetteville.
While giant lacewings have been recorded in Alaska and Panama, they have not been seen in the eastern part of the world for about half of a century.
“Entomology can function as a leading indicator for ecology,” Skvarla said. “The fact that this insect was spotted in a region that it hasn’t been seen in over half a century tells us something more broadly about the environment.”