Dr. Larry Stevens has spent over fifty years as a boatman and researcher trying to understand water and life in the Grand Canyon. In this time, he has explored much of the change in important river and spring ecosystems within the desert. On this episode of Behind the Scenery listen as Larry shares observations on insect life, healthy seeps and springs, and the role hope plays in science.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Larry: If we we're to start a first Church of the Earth, Grand Canyon would be the temple. And the story that Grand Canyon reveals about the tremendous expanse of time, life's role and change through that, through that process is the material reality that we have here and to drift off into other belief systems just takes us away from appreciation of this incredible green planet that we live on.

Behind the Scenery Introduction (multiple voices): Grand Canyon; Where hidden forces shape our ideas, beliefs, and experiences. Join us as we uncover the stories between the canyon’s colorful walls. Probe the depths and add your voice for what happens next at Grand Canyon. Hello and Welcome!... This is Behind the Scenery Luke: Hey Ya’ll, I’m Luke and Interpretive Ranger here on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. For this episode of Behind the Scenery I got the chance to sit down with Larry Stevens whose life and career has been heavily intertwined with the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. I was curious to hear Larry’s perspective on the changes and development of the river and its ecosystems and where he sees us headed in the years ahead. Larry would you be willing to introduce yourself, please? Larry: Sure. My name's Larry Stevens. I'm the director of the Spring Stewardship Institute. Senior scientist for the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. And I've got a Ph.D. in zoology from Northern Arizona University. I've been working in Grand Canyon since 1974. But in the landscape since 1970. Luke: Would you be willing to expand off of that and describe maybe what you're currently interacting with the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon with and maybe your past interactions as well? Just a brief discussion of your career. Larry: Okay. So in 1974, I became a biotech here at grand National Park, working on all manner of fire issues and insect life and bird life. Yeah, here at the park, back in those days, it was a pretty deep focus on natural history. And so as a biotech, I guess pretty much free roam of the collections and wandering around the park looking at the various organisms, did that for a year, went off back to my family farm in northern New Hampshire, uh, for a while and got a call from the Museum of Northern Arizona from Steve Carruthers, and he was looking for somebody to do an insect inventory of the Colorado River corridor. Knowing that I had that interest, he called me in and I said, Well, yes, I'm interested. And, uh, pursued the interview with him in which he asked, Do you want to do science or do you want to eat? And I said, Science, of course. I'm a scientist. So I spent two and a half years collecting, analyzing the insect fauna of the river corridor, and in that time period, learned just a huge amount, including how to row on the river and did that job as he has, he promised, I had $4.10 to my name, so I walked around Flagstaff to try to find somebody who would be willing to hire a kind of a mendicant boatman and stumbled into a company that was willing to hire me. And it launched my commercial river running career. I've done more than 400 trips on the Colorado River, commercially guiding, doing research, taking thousands of people down, many scientists, who really opened my eyes to all of dimensionality of the place over the last 50 years. And, uh, went on to get my master's and Ph.D. funding myself by doing commercial River guiding, uh, during the summer months, worked on issues related to Glen Canyon Dam. So how Glen Canyon Dam has affected the Colorado River Corridor has been a real focus of that research. Um, became the ecologist for Grand Canyon National Park in 1989, worked there for five or six years in that position, then moved on to work for the Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior, etc. and primarily working on dam management issues. Co-initiated the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council with Kim Crumble and Kelly Burke in 1998. Maybe so 25 years ago an effort to preserve the natural ecosystems and native species of the landscape. And that work has culminated just in the last, this last month with, uh, with completion of protected land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park. Work isn't completely done because kaibab national forest is not... the Teddy Roosevelt's authorization of that as a game preserve has not been reauthorized and that this is the last piece of the puzzle of trying to protect the area around Grand Canyon. Anyway. So it's been a 25 year effort to get that protection done. My typos show up in the enabling legislation for these national monuments, which is kind of strange, but good. And that's one of my one of the achievements in my life that I'm most proud of. Um, pursued many, many different topics, continuing the, you know, the biggest source of macro biodiversity of Grand Canyon is insect life. And my, my goal is to actually get a compendium of the insect life of Grand Canyon done, want to try to make as much headway as I can while I'm on the planet with that. With that effort, um, I started the Spring Stewardship Institute in part because of my interest in managing the Colorado River and all the different stakeholders that deal with it. And I serve as an environmental advisor to the Secretary of the Interior on management of Glen Canyon Dam through the Adaptive Management program. It takes decades to make headway in that program because there's so many voices and so much controversy about about the Colorado River. And in part in response to that, I began thinking more about springs, which are little points in the landscape that are incredibly influential biodiversity wise and have been widely ignored as conservation targets and so trying to bring attention to springs and better management of springs around the world. I work with about 100 different collaborators around the world who are studying the ecosystem ecology of springs, and I'll be headed to Italy in November, December to pursue a global think tank on Springs ecosystem ecology. And where we're going to go with that science. Luke: you mentioned several times now that, you know, either a focus or an interest in the insects of the environment. Is this just out of curiosity and just a passion of yours, or do insects play an important and vital role in understanding, you know, the Grand Canyon and the health of the ecosystem. Larry: Not just insects, but invertebrates in general. Remembering that the karstic terrain here is largely composed of decomposed invertebrate life. So our life has influenced Grand Canyon, you know, in ways that we scarcely think about. but the trillions and trillions of invertebrates that compose the kaibab limestone, the redwall limestone, and provide the concrete for things like the of the Coconino Sandstone And the amount of life that's gone into shaping this landscape is just incredible, very poorly known modern insect life. We don't we don't have more than one. Well, there are maybe half a dozen places on Earth where we actually understand insect biodiversity in detail. Great Smokies is one place where there's been pretty good headway made on that. But so I'm trying to bring that science up to snuff for Grand Canyon because it's such a tremendous landscape for biodiversity. We have so many poorly known species that are distributed in funny places, you know, three dozen species that are endemic to caves, for example, in Grand Canyon that we know of, not that we've explored more than a few of the thousand caves that we have in the park in terms of invertebrate life. But, uh, and then the meadows up on the north rim here support unique tiger beetles and just the list goes on and on and on. And so bringing attention to that level of biodiversity I think is important because these are pretty charismatic and sometimes just incredibly gorgeous creatures to understand. It is a passion, but it's also the role that insects play in our world is much underappreciated. Luke: I feel like I've heard a lot of times when it comes to insect understanding and knowledge, just, you know, a data deficient species is pretty frequent. Larry: Yeah, we're at, you know less than five. We know probably less than 5% of what we need to know about the insect world, for example. Some whole families of snails and, and mites and other critters, we might only know 5% of the species. Luke: Have you, have you found your research, your research into, you know, the insect invertebrate life around here, aiding you in other elements as well, like, you know, in your protection of springs or in, the ecology based around the Glen Canyon and its effect on the water. Does this, does this new amount of data that you are collecting go into furthering any other research or. Larry: Sure. Two examples of that. One is I discovered a previously unrecognized species of spring snail on the Hualapai reservation, went to the tribal council to make sure it was okay with them that I, that I named the species. The logic there is that this is an aquatic snail living at one spring in their landscape, but as a species that they can appreciate, especially because I named it after the tribe Pyrgulopsis hualapaiensis with several colleagues. Uh, that species can help protect not only that spring, but the water resource for the whole tribe. And so, uh, the tribal council agreed with that, and we went ahead and went ahead and named the species. And, um, that's one example of how a species can help protect water resources. It's been a huge controversy about insects in the Colorado Riv