Hanford Site Provides Entomological Window to History
In 1943, the U.S. government claimed and fenced 525 square miles in the Columbia Basin for construction ofthe Hanford Reservation. But that site was home to much more than a Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear facility. Over the past 12 years, WSU entomology Professor Richard Zack and his graduate students have uncovered on the site at least 223 insect species new to the state and 43 insect species new to science. “And those numbers will certainly increase,” Zack said.
In 1994, when clean-up efforts at Hanford began, the Nature Conservancy and other organizations asked that the site be kept as an environmental study area, and DOE agreed. Zack won a grant to inventory insects living on the site; to compare them with insects living off the site; and finally, to investigate insect interaction between species and with their environment at Hanford. That work is just now winding down.
“This is land that has not changed much since the first Europeans discovered it centuries ago,” he said. “Outside of that fence erected in 1943, however, the land has changed tremendously with irrigation and urbanization.The site provides a window to history, a look at what this Columbia Basin area was like before we started to change it.”
Zack and his students collected more than 3,600 species of arthropods, mostly insects. Of those, approximately 1,800 have been identified by different scientists throughout the world. The remainder still are in the process of being identified.
Zack says there were no startling discoveries, rather, there was reaffirmation of some basic entomological tenets. “What we found—and we knew this going in—was that insects, especially, are very much tied to certain habitat requirements,” he said. For example, because of a lack of disturbance, the desert floor is covered with a crust of lichens, mosses, and algae. “There are a lot of insects specifically associated with that crust that you won’t find outside the site … We’re talking about insects that probably 100, 150, 200 years ago would have been very common in this area.”
He said, considering the business conducted on the site, the Hanford land is “a very pristine environment.” The administration of President Bill Clinton agreed. In June 2000, Clinton established the Hanford Reach National Monument, which includes the 51-mile long “Hanford Reach,” the last free-flowing, non-tidal stretch of the Columbia River, as well as other tracts of land. The proclamation establishing the monument specifically cites Zack’s work on insect populations. “Such rich and diverseinsect populations are important to supporting the fauna in the monument,” it says.
