Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park feels like an alien landscape — a salmon-colored Sahara tucked under jagged cliffs near the Utah-Arizona border.
The sea of sand that stretches out in front of Amanda Barth may look desolate. But for one unique native insect, it’s home.
“This is the only place in the world for the Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetle,” said Barth, who coordinates Utah’s Rare Insect Conservation Program.
The beetle is about the size of a sunflower seed with an ivory back, bulging bug eyes and shimmering green and bronze accents. It’s a hunter armed with impressive jaws worthy of its ferocious name.
“It's a beautiful little monster with some metallic colors on it,” Barth said. “They run really fast. They see really well. They can fly.”
It only lives within the state park, which covers just a handful of sandy miles. So as climate change and recreation threaten its fragile desert habitat, it has nowhere else to go.
And the Utah program studying the bugs lost the federal money that kept it afloat. The Trump administration has targeted billions of dollars for research nationwide and continues to seek ways to control federal funding for science.
The annual survey of Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetles dates back to the 1990s, when Randolph-Macon College in Virginia led teams across the southern Utah dunes. The work Barth and her team continue to do builds on decades of research. The goal is to track how the beetle population fares year to year, so Utah can understand how to help the rare insects survive.
Iris McCulloch, one of two part-time field technicians on Barth’s team, said the hardy species plays an important role in the delicate balance of this desert ecosystem.
“It's unique to this one county, this one park,” McCulloch said. “If it goes, it's gone forever. And it's really sad to think about.”
The dunes may seem inhospitable, but if you look closely, they teem with life. Beetle larvae burrow beneath the sand in swales — bowl-shaped depressions between the dunes where sparse vegetation grows. The adults are predators and scavengers that eat flies and other insects.
On this sunny morning in May, Barth led around a dozen scientists and volunteers up over a dune ridge and into a swale. The group formed a line and slowly combed across the fine, soft sand — eyes fixed on the ground for any flicker of movement.
“Once you know what you're looking for, it's easier to spot them,” said volunteer Louise Haven of Park City.
This was Haven’s first beetle survey. She has canvassed for plants before, but said it’s different when your subject is trying to get away from you.
The beetles’ keen senses help them evade predators — or in this case, the humans with nets who want to study them.
“It's really rewarding once you finally get one,” she said as she gently corralled a beetle and tapped it into one of the old film canisters the survey uses as vials.
On the next dune over, volunteer Allison Blood spotted a pair of mating beetles and scooped them into her net before they knew what happened. Like most of the folks here, she drove several hours from northern Utah to be part of the survey, drawn by an affinity for six-legged creatures.
“I've always loved bugs, and so I've been searching for opportunities,” Blood said. “I think ‘Utah entomology volunteer’ was the Google search.”
The tiger beetles can use all the extra help they can get.
Climate change is increasing heat and droughts in southern Utah, which threatens their habitat. Even though the beetles are adapted to the desert, below-average precipitation means there are fewer small bugs for them to eat.
That’s a concern in a historically dry year like this. The beetle larvae can delay their metamorphosis for an extra year if conditions aren’t right, Barth said, so the population may not feel the impacts of this dry winter until next year.
“That's their one little trick,” Barth said. “If times are hard for more than a couple years, then they might not be able to make it.”
And there are much larger things crawling the dunes: off-highway vehicles.
A federal conservation agreement between Utah and the Bureau of Land Management is supposed to block off-road vehicles from the part of the park with the highest concentration of beetles. Even with the 265-acre conservation parcel, around 90% of the dune field is open to OHVs.
The federal government proposed listing the beetle as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2013, but withdrew the proposal later that year. If it were listed, these dunes would become critical habitat — a change that Barth said could devastate the local recreation economy.
But managing vehicles and beetles side by side has proven to be tricky. The fierce winds that created the dunes keep moving the piles of sand and the beetles that live there. The shifting sands also swallow the fence posts that mark the conservation area, making it harder for visitors to know the rules.
OHVs can directly crush the beetles and harm the sand’s ability to hold moisture, Barth said. Even one set of tire tracks can linger as a destructive scar.
“That habitat is lost,” Barth said. “It's lost, and it takes a long time for it to recover.”
The scientists studying the bugs face plenty of challenges, too.
After Barth’s team lost the federal money that supported this research, she lost her only full-time employee.
“I am grieving,” Barth said. “My program capacity just cratered. Absolutely cratered.”
Barth has recently been able to piece together some state money to hire a part-time employee for next year’s survey season, but the reality, she said, is that Utah’s desert ecosystems remain dreadfully under-studied.
“This is a story we know about,” Barth said of the Coral Pink Sand Dunes. “But there are a number of other dunes and badlands around the state that have never had anything like this amount of intensive sampling, and we really don't know what the impacts of OHV recreation are on those places.”
Across the weeklong survey, the group found more beetles this year than last. That’s a promising sign, McCulloch said. And with so many big problems in the world, it felt good to do one small, tangible thing to help.
“A lot of our planet that we live on is sort of slipping away from us every day, and people are too busy to notice or to care,” McCulloch said. “But this is the one planet that we have. It's the one Coral Pink Sand Dunes that we have. And this beetle is a really unique piece of the whole puzzle.”
