"Butterflies of America" update

[Nick Grishin]

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We've just completed a major update to our "Butterflies of America" 
website to include thousands of new images. If you have a few minutes it's 
definitely worth a look:

http://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/

When the website started a couple of years ago, most entries in the 
species list

http://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/list.htm

were "black", i.e., they didn't have any links behind them as we had no 
images to show. Now, almost all are "blue" with links to illustrate these 
butterflies. Many of the images we display are your images, assembled by 
us in one place for everyone to enjoy. Thank you for your generous support 
and contributions, every one of them is very much valued and adds to the 
overall mosaic of helpful photographs.

During the last year we have reached certain milestones. Here are the most 
important ones:

1.) There are over 85,000 images on the web-site. It might not be
      immediately obvious, but the images are all there, hiding behind the
      blue name links.

2.) All but a handful of taxa are represented by at least one image. Most
      of these images are specimen images, especially for Mexican, Central
      American and Caribbean taxa, as we could obtain them from various
      collections (including the MGCL, USNM, AMNH, ANSP, CMNH, CAS, LACM,
      SDNHM, MZFC, IBUNAM and private collections). We are really looking
      forward to further developing our live butterfly image collection for
      the neotropics in the coming year.

3.) For the first time in human history, we completely illustrate all
      Skipper species recorded to occur north of the Colombia-Panama border.
      Skippers are one of the most difficult butterfly groups and we worked
      hard to figure every single one of them.

4.) We are honored to display some of the images from the incredible
      Janzen & Hallwachs database

     http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu/caterpillars/database.lasso

      taken by many people involved in the Costa Rican Guanacaste
      biodiversity project. Their titanic collection of caterpillar images
      is unmatched in terms of species diversity, and we are lucky to show
      some representative photographs, e.g.,

     http://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/t/Achlyodidini_a.htm

      These are really important photographs, as most specimens behind them
      have been "barcoded" with DNA sequences available for future studies
      and comparative work.

5.) Genitalia structures are essential for butterfly taxonomy, and we have
      started displaying genitalic photos and illustrations from various
      works, e.g., Godman & Salvin. Correct determination of difficult
      species using genitalia is needed to learn more about these insects
      and to develop reliable fieldmarks for their identification when
      possible.

6.) When showing photographs from museum collections, we pay special
      attention to the type specimens (a series used for the description of
      a taxon), and we are dedicated to growing our "type" collection for
      all of you to consult. These images show first in the thumbnail
      pages, e.g.:

     http://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/t/Megathymus_y_yuccae_a.htm

      For many more taxa, type specimen images will be added during the
      next year.

Currently, BOA is not a field guide and is lacking detailed information 
about distributions. Both of these features, as everyone would agree, are 
very important to have. Due to limited time and resources, we have been 
concentrating on building the photographic image collection, as 
butterflies are variable and such a diversity of images we think is quite 
helpful to have access to. This will remain our priority, but if we can, 
we plan to provide identification keys and fieldmarks to highlight 
differences between species.

If you like what you see on BOA and you have images of the species not 
well illustrated, please consider sharing them with us. Finally, BOA is an 
effort of volunteers. At the end of the calendar year, if you can, please 
consider a 100% tax-deductible gift to the Butterflies of America 
Foundation to keep us afloat and enable maintenance and growth of the BOA 
website.

http://butterfliesofamerica.com/donate.htm

Have a healthy and happy 2011!


Andrew D. Warren, Kim Davis, Nick V. Grishin,
Jonathan P. Pelham and Mike Stangeland

 
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