The McGuire Center was privileged to host visiting researchers in October and November 2023, through the Mr. Carl Wisler and Dr. Midge Smith Visiting Researcher Endowment.
Roy Goff traveled from his home base in England to photograph several hundred species of Sub-Saharan African moths in our collection to add to his growing website, African Moths. This image-based website features more than 4,500 species. Since books and other printed reference materials are not readily available to local researchers in Africa, internet resources are especially important for identifications. While at the McGuire Center and with additional grant support from the Center for Systematic Entomology, Roy focused on imaging expertly identified specimens of species not already represented on the website or anywhere else on the internet. With images of the accompanying labels on each specimen, his work documented hundreds of new country records. Since the launch of African Moths in 2007, more people have become interested in monitoring moth diversity on the continent with the help of this valuable tool. Some examples of African moths from the McGuire Center collection are shown in the gallery below including several specimens from the Republic of Malawi collected by Ray Murphy.
Krushnamegh Kunte, an Associate Professor with the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, India, visited in November to work on various studies involving swallowtail butterflies of the genus Papilio from around the world. Along with imaging selected specimens for his research, he and McGuire Center Curatorial Assistant Marcela Diaz Zamora made tremendous progress sorting and curating our swallowtail collection. Dr. Kunte, who is familiar with the Center from his visits more than a decade ago as a graduate student and postdoc, will return later this year to continue sorting our swallowtail collections and mentoring Marcela in curation of this family.
