[NHCOLL-L:957] Florida to Get Big Butterfly Center

[Sally Shelton]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/20/science/20MOTH.html

March 20, 2001 

Florida to Get Big Butterfly Center

By STEVE COATES

At a time when many natural history museums are scaling back their entomological departments, an unusual private donation will enable the University of Florida to build the world's largest research and education center dedicated to the study of butterflies and moths.

Project leaders say the new complex, the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera, will be finished in 2003 and will house at least six million specimens, one of the largest collections in the United States, representing a significant percentage of all existing species.

It will also differ from many institutions in its emphasis on conservation and related environmental issues like biodiversity, climate change and habitat loss, said Dr. Thomas C. Emmel, a professor of zoology at Florida, who is to be the center's first director.

"A primary mission will be to reach agreements with countries around the world for exploring their biodiversity," said Dr. Emmel, who is well known among lepidopterists for his role in efforts to save the Schaus swallowtail, an endangered butterfly in South Florida. He noted that governments in less-developed countries often depended on biodiversity surveys to enable them to set aside land for preservation as national parks.

Dr. Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and biodiversity expert, said of the project: "As it is realized, it will be the major center for the study of biodiversity in the world. It comes at a critical time for the conservation of invertebrates, which tend to get the short end of scientific and environmental effort."

Much of the collection will be formed from the substantial but scattered holdings that already belong to the university and the state of Florida, including the collections of the Allyn Museum of Entomology in Sarasota and the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville. Other donations and acquisitions are soon expected to bring the number of specimens to more than six million, but there will be enough expansion space to double or triple that figure over the next couple of decades, Dr. Emmel said.

The initial donation of $4.2 million for the complex was made late last year by Dr. William W. McGuire, the chairman of UnitedHealth Group, and his wife, Nadine M. McGuire. The gift is the largest private donation for insect systematics ever made in the United States, Dr. Emmel said. A matching grant from the State of Florida will help complete the project.

Dr. McGuire, a medical doctor who is also an accomplished amateur lepidopterist, said he chose the University of Florida because it had continued to expand its collections- based programs while many other major universities and public institutions were cutting back.

Current plans call for the construction of a three-story building on the Gainesville campus with 40,000 square feet of offices, laboratories and collection space. That is about four times the room devoted to butterflies and moths at any other institution, Dr. Emmel said. There will also be a large library, a public museum, a live butterfly exhibit, a butterfly garden and an auditorium for conferences.

Lepidopterists said they were impressed with plans for staffing levels, with 10 to 12 full-time curators and professors and up to 15 visiting scholars and 30 graduate students at a time.

 "That's far and away more than anyone else has," said Dr. Frederick H. Rindge,  emeritus curator of lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History. He and one scientific assistant manage the five million specimens at their museum, he said.

The Smithsonian Institution estimates it has between five million and six million specimens. As older foundations, it and the American Museum of Natural History also own a relatively high percentage of so- called holotypes, specimens that define a species and are thus most crucial for taxonomy. 

The largest organized collection of lepidoptera in the world is the 8.7 million specimens at the Natural History Museum in London, including some 60 percent of  the world's holotypes. The Natural History Museum in Paris is said to have some 10  million butterflies and moths, but many of those have never been sorted.