Remember in our Meet The Team: Bob Belmont post, we talked about Bob’s hobby of studying and collecting geometrid moths? For those of you that didn’t know, for the past 41 years, Bob has built a private collection of geometrid moths as a hobby.

Part of Bob's Collection of Geometrid Moths

Over time the collection has exceeded the space limits of his custom built lab at his home.  It also became too valuable to keep at home due to the rarity of many of the moths. So in December 2009, Bob donated his ENTIRE moth collection to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity in Gainesville, FL. Their Lepidoptera collection is the second largest in the world and will soon be the largest! The McGuire collection is kept in a very protected and climate-controlled environment utilizing the most modern methods of collection maintenance.

These two geometrids are new to science! They remain undescribed.

According to Dr. Tom Emmel, Director of the Center, Bob’s “…donation of 13,909 pinned and labeled geometrid moths was a valuable…and important contribution to our collection.” Bob said he plans to continue his hobby of studying moths and insects in his home lab and years from now, when he decides to retire, he hopes to continue studying geometridae at the McGuire Center.

Tags: Bob Belmont, Florida Museum of Natural History, Geometrid Moths, McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Pest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.