Butterflies are winged insects from the lepidopteran suborder Rhopalocera, characterized by large, often brightly coloured wings that often fold together when at rest, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the superfamilies Hedyloidea and Papilionoidea. The oldest butterfly fossils have been dated to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago, though they likely originated in the Late Cretaceous, about 101 million years ago.
Lycaenidae is the second-largest family of butterflies, with over 6,000 species worldwide, whose members are also called gossamer-winged butterflies. They constitute about 30% of the known butterfly species.
Riodinidae is the family of metalmark butterflies. The common name "metalmarks" refers to the small, metallic-looking spots commonly found on their wings. The 1,532 species are placed in 146 genera. Although mostly Neotropical in distribution, the family is also represented both in the Nearctic, Palearctic, Australasian (Dicallaneura), Afrotropic, and Indomalayan realms.
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
Thomas S. Ray is an evolutionary biologist known for his research in tropical biology, digital evolution, and the human mind.
Miletinae is a subfamily of the family Lycaenidae of butterflies, commonly called harvesters and woolly legs, and virtually unique among butterflies in having predatory larvae. Miletinae are entirely aphytophagous. The ecology of the Miletinae is little understood, but adults and larvae live in association with ants, and most known species feed on Hemiptera, though some, like Liphyra, feed on the ants themselves. The butterflies, ants, and hemipterans, in some cases, seem to have complex symbiotic relationships benefiting all.
Julián Monge-Nájera is a Costa Rican ecologist, scientific editor, educator and photographer. He has done research with the following institutions: Universidad de Costa Rica, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and Universidad Estatal a Distancia. His scientific work has been featured by The New York Times; National Geographic; the BBC; Wired; IFLoveScience; The Independent (London) and Reader's Digest, among others. He is a member of the expert panel that sets the environmental Doomsday Clock; Onychophora curator in the Encyclopedia of Life; and team member of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Catonephele numilia, the blue-frosted banner, blue-frosted Catone, Grecian shoemaker or stoplight Catone, is a butterfly of the family Nymphalidae found in Central and South America.
William Schaus was an American entomologist who became known for his major contribution to the knowledge and description of new species of the Neotropical Lepidoptera.
Carl W. Rettenmeyer was an American biologist who specialised in army ants. He was born in Meriden, Connecticut, and later attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He first became interested in army ants when he visited Panama as an undergraduate and then returned there as a postgraduate. Although he studied many aspects of army ant biology, he particularly focused on the animals associated with the ants and especially mites which live on the ants. He was well known for his photography of army ants, with his photographs appearing in over 100 publications, and he used his video footage to create two DVDs. He taught at the University of Kansas from 1960 until 1971 and then at the University of Connecticut until his retirement in 1996, after being diagnosed with Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. After his death in 2009, a set of papers on army ants were published in Insectes Sociaux in memory of his work.
Theodore Christian Schneirla was an American animal psychologist who performed some of the first studies on the behavior patterns of army ants.
Carla Maria Penz is a butterfly comparative morphologist and systematist, and the former Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Biodiversity at the University of New Orleans. Her research also focuses on natural history and behavior, mostly of neotropical butterflies. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans, Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History (NY), Florida Museum of Natural History (FL), and The Milwaukee Public Museum (WI).
Singing caterpillars is a term coined by Philip James DeVries, referring to the fact that the larvae of ant-associated butterfly species of the families Riodinidae and Lycaenidae produce substrate borne sounds that attract ants. The study of these symbiotic associations was pioneered by Phil DeVries in Central America, and Naomi Pierce in Australia. Recently, Lucas Kaminski and collaborators are expanding the studies of riodinid-ant symbioses in Brazil.
Eurybia elvina, commonly known as the blind eurybia, is a Neotropical metalmark butterfly. Like many other riodinids, the caterpillars are myrmecophilous and have tentacle nectary organs that exude a fluid similar to that produced by the host plant Calathea ovandensis. This mutualistic relationship allows ants to harvest the exudate, and in return provide protection in the form of soil shelters for larvae. The larvae communicate with the ants by vibrations produced by the movement of its head. The species was described and given its binomial name by the German lepidopterist Hans Stichel in 1910.
Beryl B. Simpson is a professor emerita in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously she was an associate curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the Department of Botany. She studies plant systematics and tropical botany, focusing on angiosperms found in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central and South America. She was awarded the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany for her decades of work on the subject.
Winifred Hallwachs is an American tropical ecologist who helped to establish and expand northwestern Costa Rica's Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). The work of Hallwachs and her husband Daniel Janzen at ACG is considered an exemplar of inclusive conservation.
Stevan James Arnold is an American evolutionary biologist. He is Professor Emeritus of Integrative Biology and was Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles at Oregon State University, Corvallis until his retirement. He has served as president of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists.
Jose Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was initiated in 2001 by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, USA. It is named after José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist who worked on the flora of tropical South America. It is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a very significant contribution to advancing the field of tropical botany. Nominations for the award can be made by all in the Botany Department at the museum.
Paul Slud was an American ornithologist and tropical ecologist, known for his 1960 monograph The Birds of Finca "La Selva," Costa Rica and his 1964 book The Birds of Costa Rica: Distribution and Ecology.
Styx is a monotypic genus of butterflies in the metalmark family Riodinidae. It consists of one species, Styx infernalis, described by Otto Staudinger in 1875. It is endemic to Peru, where it inhabits tropical montane cloud forests between the elevations of 1000-1600 meters.
