Keith Willmott, an assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, explains his research and the importance in creating a broader insight into the diversity of butterflies in Ecuador. The goals for his research include discovering what butterflies live in Ecuador, mapping their distributions and documenting the basic biology and history of the many species.
Interview and videos produced by Jessica Southard for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Keith Willmott: My research is focused on the butterflies of Ecuador which is a small country on the western side of South America. It’s a particularly fascinating country because it has a great variety of different habitats, the Andes Mountains which extend down through the middle and divide the country into three separate regions. So my work it has a number of goals including trying to find out just what butterflies occur in Ecuador, trying to map their distributions, and trying to find out the most basic information about their biology and natural history. So for many species this kind of information is simply not available at all. Many species haven’t been seen since they were first collected and described 100-150 years ago.
So we spend a lot of time going on field trips to Ecuador, one to three months a year, we travel throughout the country and collect butterflies using different techniques. We use nets and traps and we also use ropes to get up into the tree canopy and at the end of our trip we bring specimens back here to the museum at the University of Florida and we spend a lot of time sorting them and identifying them and preparing them for integration into these collections and to collections of our collaborators out in Ecuador. At the same time as we identify specimens we occasionally find species which are unknown to science, which is pretty exciting and so far we’ve described more than 100 species just from Ecuador alone.
This work is also led to a couple of other projects which I’ve been involved in. One looking at the tropical Andes as a whole, stretching from Venezuela down to Bolivia, and our work there has been trying to provide a baseline of information for future research in that region by documenting specimens in existing collections and secondly a project looking at the evolution of a particular group of butterflies which is especially diverse in Ecuador. These are Ithomiine butterflies which are notable for being transparent and warningly colored, because of being distasteful to predators such as birds and we’ve been looking at where these butterflies occur in the forest and how so many species can occur together in one place.
So this work has given us much broader insight as to the diversity of butterflies in Ecuador, and similarly the biological origins of those butterflies and perhaps most importantly it helps us to identify which are the most important areas in Ecuador to try to conserve butterflies to preserve in perpetuity the incredible diversity of that region.
Why Science? Studying the Diversity of Life
I’m a researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History and my work is focused on the butterflies of Ecuador. We want to find out how many species of butterflies occur in Ecuador and to map their distributions and to find out some very basic information about their biology and natural history.
I decided to become a scientist or more probably a systematist because of my interest in biological diversity and systematists are scientists who study the diversity of life. Like many people I find nature to be extremely beautiful and I’m fascinated by the diversity, in cataloguing that diversity and understanding where it came from and systematics the science of the study of diversity it helps me to do that and it gives me opportunities for travel to exotic and beautiful countries, such as Ecuador.
It also allows me to spend time studying butterflies in fantastic museums such as the museum where I work, Florida Museum of Natural History, and very satisfying science because it produces of order from the immensely chaotic life which we observe around us. All these reasons make make the job of a museum systematists for me simply the best job that there is.
Learn more about the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera & Biodiversity at the Florida Museum.