Need butterfly slide donations

[DAVID NUNNALLEE]

Greetings, Leps-L-ites:

Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo is in the process of building a new butterfly house.  Current plans are to use the house for two years, then take it down for replacement with some other exhibit.  Many of us locally think the exhibit will be very well received, and even hope that they might make it a permanent facility.  Anyway, the zoo people are planning to stock the exhibit with commercially available species of butterflies and moths, some 52 species in all including 11 species of moths.  The zoo is looking for 35mm slides of these 52 species to use in a brochure for identification for visitors while visiting the butterfly house.  They also would like to use a few selected slides in advertisements for the display.

It seems that most commercially available lep chrysalises are of species found in the SE part of the United States; of the 41 butterfly species on the list, only 10 are known from here in Washington State.  The problem is that we local butterfly photographers are not able to provide good images of many of the eastern species, even though most are very common in the east.  And we are particularly weak on the eastern moths, of which we have very limited material.

Woodland Park Zoo is a non-profit City-owned public entity; they have no budget for acquiring these images, hence they cannot pay a commission for using them.  They will credit any contributing photographers on the brochure, but basically there is no money in this process, but think of the fame!  This is the first exhibit of any significance anywhere in this region of the United States, and it is a real opportunity to generate public interest in our American leps.

If anyone is interested in allowing the zoo to use their 35mm slide image(s) of some of the common eastern butterflies or moths, please contact me (David Nunnallee) at davidn at nwlink.com, or contact Mr. Keith Yoshida directly at the Woodland Park Zoo, at  keith.yoshida at zoo.org   The slides would be digitally scanned, and returned to the lender.

The following is a list of the species for which we currently have no (or only poor) images:

Moths:
Polyphemus Moth	Antheraea polyphemus
Io Moth			Automeris io
Promethia Moth		Callosamia promethia
Crecropia Moth		Hyalophora cecropia
Cynthia Moth		Samia cynthia
Galium Sphinx		Hemaris (Celereo) gallii
Hummingbird Moth	Hemaris thysbe
Big Poplar Sphinx	Pachysphinx modesta
Blind Sphinx		Paonias excaecatus
Cerisy's Sphinx		Smerinthus cerisyi

Butterflies:
Goatweed Butterfly	Anaea andria
Hackberry Emperor	Asterocampa celtis
American Snout		Libytheana carinenta
Atala			Eumaeus atala
California Sister		Adelpha bredowii
Julia			Dryas julia
Variegated Fritillary	Euptoieta claudia
White Admiral		Limenitis a. astyanax
Ruddy Daggerwing	Marpesia petreus
Comma			Polygonia comma
Question Mark		Polygonia interrogationis
Malachite		Siproeta stelenes
Tailless Swallowtail	Battus polydamas
Spicebush Swallowtail	Papilio troilus

Thanks for your help -

Dave Nunnallee
davidn at nwlink.com
Issaquah, WA