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Friday, March 29, 2024

Jilda Hall has been coming to the Florida Museum of Natural History for years. She used to bring her son when he was a kid. Now, she brings her grandson, Thomas.

Hall held Thomas by the hand. She led him through a hallway of glass frames filled with butterflies Wednesday afternoon. She explained to her grandson how butterfly specimens at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity used to be displayed in drawers when his father was a child.

“I hope (my son and grandson) are able to learn from things other people have curated and donated,” Hall said as Thomas ran ahead of her to continue exploring. “Maybe someday, my grandson will be a collector and a donor, too.”

The Hall family may soon benefit from more extensive research done at the McGuire Center after a donation of more than 70,000 specimens was made to the museum last year for research. Two lifelong collectors of butterflies and moths, Ed Knudson and Charles Bordelon, called their donated inventory the Texas Lepidoptera Survey Research Collection.

Bordelon died in 2016, but he and his partner decided to donate the collection to the museum before his death, according to the museum’s website.

Collections coordinator Andrei Sourakov said the McGuire Center houses one of the world’s largest collections for lepidoptera — butterflies and moths — with its millions of specimens.

The donation is not an exhibit for public viewing, but it will help UF receive grants for the study and improvement of lepidoptera collections, Sourakov said. It will also attract entomologists who want to start their own collections with the reassurance they will be studied.

“When people collect all their lives, they want to put the collection somewhere where it will be used,” Sourakov said. 

Sourakov said the collection will help researchers study lepidoptera genetics and environmental changes, identify undescribed and unseen species and better understand the effect of global climate change on their habitats.

“By studying genetics of butterflies and moths, people learn a lot about genetics of other organisms,” he said. “Including ourselves.”

By day, collectors like Knudson and Bordelon may go out into fields with nets to capture specimens. By night, they use sheets and black lights that attract the moths.

As Sourakov pulled a thick red field guide of North American lepidopteras off a nearby bookshelf, he explained how important it is that Knudson and Bordelon correctly illustrated and organized the species similarly.

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The most important thing about the donation, Sourakov said, is that collectors want their decades-long project to be studied and preserved, not kept under lock and key collecting dust.

“Collections are used in so many numerous ways that are limited only by the imagination of the people who use them,” he said.

Follow Angela on Twitter @angdimi  and contact her at adimichele@alligator.org.

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