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By Cary Shimek, UM News Service
MISSOULA – For several weeks this summer, 91次元 student Iris McKean found herself sitting in the dark all night in an urban park an hour’s train ride south of Tokyo. Sporting a headlamp, she covered herself head to toe in protective clothing – including a mesh head net – to ward off bugs and huntsman spiders the size of a human palm.
She was part of a UM team studying rhinoceros beetles, a beloved insect icon in Japan. The researchers kept their lamps and video cameras trained on sappy parts of oak trees frequented by the thumb-sized beetles. They beheld the drama of big-horned males battling for the right to court females, who may or may not decide to mate with them.
McKean handled nearly every rhino beetle they studied, weighing and marking them so they could identify the specific dramatic characters featured in their research.
“They don’t bite, and they are such cool, cute creatures,” she said. “But their gripping feet are like little razor blades, and they can make tiny incisions and stick there. So I was careful to wear gloves.”
Science in a city offered peculiar challenges. Sometimes park security arrived to investigate what the strange Montanans were doing under a tree at 3 a.m. Other times little kids visiting the park with their families would snag one of their research subjects and scamper off. In Japan, rhinoceros beetles are prized as pets and often end up in terrariums.
“What could we say?” she said. “We were the strangers, and it was a public park.”
All of this reinforced to McKean that she was a long way from Glasgow, her northeastern Montana hometown. And also that UM had provided her an incredible, life-changing learning experience.
McKean is fascinated by the idea of the butterfly effect – that something as small as the flap of butterfly wings can echo through systems and eventually influence the path of a tornado. She said lots of lesser decisions on her part led to her educational adventure in Japan.
The first was her decision to attend UM. She grew up hunting and fishing – her father, Andrew, is editor of Outdoor Life Magazine – and she describes herself as “outdoorsy” and “the most curious person ever.” She found herself wanting to know more about the Montana animals and ecosystem she grew up with, so she was attracted to UM’s top-ranked Wildlife Biology program. After positive interactions with faculty members like Chad Bishop and Angela Luis, she decided to attend UM in 2022 to study wildlife biology and pre-veterinary studies.
McKean also followed in the footsteps of her older brother, Ellis McKean, who ran cross-country at UM. She too joined UM as a student-athlete, becoming a top contributor for the Grizzly women’s cross-country team.
As a sophomore, McKean took a genetics and evolution class from Doug Emlen, a UM scientist who studies animal weaponry and one of the few Montanans ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. McKean said she “really connected with the material” and that it left her “thirsty for more.”
“After that I started going to Doug’s office hours like once a week just so I could pick his brain about all the different questions I had,” she said. “He’s a wealth of knowledge in every realm.”
By her junior year, McKean became curious about the research process such as grant writing, data collection and publishing results. So sitting at her kitchen table in Glasgow, she decided to email Emlen and ask whether he knew of any openings for an undergraduate research assistant.
“Students like Iris are a joy to work with,” Emlen said, “so I jumped at the chance to get her involved with our research.”
That little flap of a butterfly’s wing earned McKean a gig with one of Emlen’s Ph.D. students, Sophie Fitzgerald, who studies rhinoceros beetles. During fall semester 2024, McKean found herself working several hours a week in Fitzgerald’s lab, dissecting frozen female beetles, counting their eggs and studying their ability to produce offspring.
It was Fitzgerald who invited McKean along to assist with two other UM students and led the team on their journey to Japan to study rhino beetles in their natural habitat.
“Sophia has just been an incredible asset for me,” McKean said. “She’s been the most friendly and supportive person I’ve ever met, and she was so accepting of plugging me into the lab so I could help out in any capacity.”
Fitzgerald’s Japan research delved into sexual selection among rhinoceros beetles, especially why females choose to mate with certain males. McKean said past research generally focused on the males, who battle for the females by dueling with their big horns and flipping rivals off the trees. Usually the beetle with the bigger weapon wins, but this isn’t always the case.
“It seems horn size matters, but maybe not as much as we previously thought,” McKean said. “The big horn indicates fitness and health to the female, but I keep thinking about these smaller males with shorter horns, and they get flipped off and keep coming back again and again, and sometimes the female just gives in. So resilience is a big factor, too. We didn’t find that females were always choosing the male with the biggest horn.”
McKean said the male beetles make for big ungainly fliers, carrying around those massive horns.
She said the research team had cameras set up to record the beetle-battle mating drama at several sites around the park. All that data now needs to be analyzed, and the research project is ongoing.
McKean said the regular Japanese people in their study area seemed lukewarm to the research team until they learned what they were up to. Their reception improved when the team revealed they studied the well-being of their beloved rhino beetle population. The researchers heard anecdotally that fewer beetles were emerging each spring later in the season, which was creating concern.
“You could tell people definitely care,” she said. “And we are not sure what’s going on. Is it a long-term impact like climate change?”
While research was the focus of the Japan trip, McKean spent a lot of time running in the Japanese humidity to maintain her cross-country training regimen. Additionally, her mother, Lih-An Yang McKean, who was born in Taiwan, rendezvoused with her on that island to reconnect with Asian family members she hadn’t seen in more than a decade.
At one point, she and two other research team members also climbed Japan’s highest peak, Mount Fuji, which tops out at 12,388 feet.
“We didn’t do any planning and roughed it really hard,” McKean said. “I think we were awake for 30 to 34 hours. We started hiking at 3 a.m. and got to see the sunrise from the top. We saw some sika deer up there, and we sent postcards to our family from a post office near the top. The entire experience was unbelievable.”
Now launching her senior year, McKean is leaning into more of a pre-med track at UM and exploring a career as a doctor.
“UM has given me so many unique experiences and learning opportunities,” she said. “The faculty have been so supportive, my classmates have pushed me, and my team has been the light of my life. And there’s such an emphasis on experiential learning, so you can end up having the craziest, best summer ever.
“I feel so lucky to be here, definitely, and I’m excited to see what’s next.”
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu.