Staff from the laboratory of Dr. Donald Dahlsten at the U.C. Berkeley Center for Biological Control joined several local volunteers on November 19 to collect overwintering elm leaf beetles for use in an Australian biological control project (a long and fascinating story). Searches of several promising beetle sites yielded less than a hundred beetles. On the same date last year, a similar hunt group collected approximately 16,000 beetles from just one Santa Margarita woodpile. How can this be explained? That's a study for an insect population ecologist. Though the 2002 small game hunters didn't snag a lot of beetles, they had a great time trying.