I actually liked the article, because it takes nature to the common
man and highlights conservation issues appropriately. While we might
quibble over the errors (and I do agree that they should have been
weeded out), but the key issue for me is the messaging, which was good!
Rgds
Sanjay Sondhi
Founder Trustee, TITLI TRUST
Member, Kalpavriksh
+91 9412052189
Dehradun
www.titlitrust.com
www.kalpavriksh.org
New! More than 250 moth species from north east India on the Titli
Trust website
On 14-Jul-11, at 3:20 AM, Kishen Das wrote:
The errors that you have mentioned were not minor !!!
"Double Branded Brown Crow", "One of the Czech nationals was a well
known entomologist, which should have been highlighted" , "Rates of
rare butterflies" ( Peter ji can throw more light on this or you can
google yourself ). "Butterflies are not next to bees", there are
other insect groups that do much better when it comes to
pollination, so their contribution to agriculture is not that
significant.
When someone talks about conservation, they should be thorough and
technically right, if they are serious about it.
As I said earlier, the intention is very good, but the whole article
is weakened by lack of information and major errors ( They all are
major at least to me !!! ) .
Since the author has highlighted your work, he should have at least
consulted you once, before publishing this.
I rest my case here.
Kishen
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Kunte, Krushnamegh <[email protected]
> wrote:
Kishen, can you also send your list of errors to this group? Not
everyone is a member on FB, and the FB pages are not publicly
accessible. Besides, I do not think there are too many errors in
that article: I have detected only three, which I have already
conveyed to the author of that article. Here’s the relevant portion
of my email to the author:
“I just noticed two minor errors: (a) Sahyadri is the Western Ghats,
it is not in the Western Ghats. Sahyadri is the Indian name for the
Western Ghats. (b) Mud-puddling male butterflies do not smear
themselves in salty mud. They gather on wet soil and sip a lot of
water, from which they take up salts and excrete remaining water.
They remain as clean as ever during this process. They then pass on
the salts and other nutrients along with the sperm to female
butterflies during mating.” The spelling of Jezebel, as “Zezebel”,
is also wrong. But I do not think this article deserves to be
dismissed out of hand, as you seemed to do. In fact, I think this
article is much better written than most popular articles and news
coverage on butterflies that I have seen in India.
BTW, people who do not know what we are talking about, here’s the
article:
http://downtoearth.org.in/content/butterfly-effect
Our own Arjan Basu Roy, the Heblekars and their butterfly gardens
have been prominently featured in it.
Krushnamegh.
From: Kishen Das <[email protected]>
Reply-To: butterflyindia <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:25:24 -0400
To: butterflyindia <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ButterflyIndia] BOI now has 412 species pages, 146
lifecycles and 6,000 photos: 8 July '11
Please ignore that article, there are several mistakes in that
article.
Although the intention is good, the purpose of the article is
weakend by its incorrect technical details.
Please search for Down To Earth in Facebook ButterflyIndia group.
Most of the mistakes have been mentioned there.
Kishen
On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:33 AM, satyendra tiwari
<[email protected]> wrote:
I just received Down to Earth Magazine that mentions with 1800 known
species and subspecies in India.
Which is Totally wrong now.
Satyendra K.Tiwari
Wildlife Photographer, Naturalist & Tour Leader
H.No 129, P.O.Tala. Distt Umaria M.P. India
Pin code 484-661
Tel. No. 07627-265309 <tel:07627-265309> day time phone only
From: "Kunte, Krushnamegh" <[email protected]>
To: butterflyindia <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, 11 July, 2011 9:02:12 AM
Subject: Re: [ButterflyIndia] BOI now has 412 species pages, 146
lifecycles and 6,000 photos: 8 July '11
Dear Kishen,
Thanks for your encouragement and support. We will eventually have
all the Indian species and subspecies covered on the website, we are
working steadily towards that goal.
BTW, it is commonly said that there are approx. 1,500 butterfly
species in India. That number is now outdated. I have listed all the
Indian species and subspecies for my upcoming Catalogue, and there
are no more than 1,300 species in India, and possibly as few as
1,200. More information about this will be in the Catalogue.
We have learned from our first server crash and virus attack. Now we
take daily backups and frequently download backup copies on two
computers and also store these on three external hard drives in at
least three different places. We also handle all the uploads/
downloads only from Mac and Linux computers, which are way less
vulnerable to virus attacks and they are scanned daily with updated
virus scanners, anyway. I sleep well nowadays with the assurance
that we are extremely highly unlikely to lose the website again, or
any photographs and data, for that matter.
With best wishes,
Krushnamegh.
From: Kishen Das <[email protected]>
Reply-To: butterflyindia <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 19:57:16 -0400
To: butterflyindia <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ButterflyIndia] BOI now has 412 species pages, 146
lifecycles and 6,000 photos: 8 July '11
Dear Krushnameghji and team,
It would be amazing once we have 1501 species on IFB.
It would be the ultimate reference point.
Congratulations to all the people.
It indeed takes lot of hard work behind such a website.
Please keep taking multiple backups of the entire website, say every
weekend.
I guess most of the websites now-a-days also support auto-backups.
Thanks,
Kishen
On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Kunte, Krushnamegh <[email protected]
> wrote:
Folks, after recovering the Butterflies of India website on 6 Feb.
2011 and bringing the number of species pages to 135, we set
ourselves what now appears as a modest target of 300 species pages.
In the past five months we have made much progress and comfortably
surpassed the target. Today, the Butterflies of India website has
412 species pages, 146 lifecycles, and approximately 6,000 reference
photographs. Major additions to species pages and to the collection
of reference photographs came from recent field trips of our team
members to the Garo Hills in Meghalaya, and from Sikkim in the
Eastern Himalaya. The lifecycles were mostly the work of Dr. Saji
K., who has contributed more than a hundred lifecycles and nearly
2,000 images to the website by now. Rohan Lovalekar and Gaurav
Agavekar have taken some of the most stunning images of Indian
butterflies that I have seen so far, and photographed hundreds of
species in the past one or two years. In the past 3-4 months, they
have also tirelessly formatted many of these pictures for the
website, including those images given to them by others. Hats off to
Saji, Rohan and Gaurav!
Here are two links that will lead you to most of the stuff that’s on
the website right now:
http://ifoundbutterflies.org/species-pages/history-of-species-pages-on-butterflies-of-india-website
http://ifoundbutterflies.org/species-pages/history-of-lifecycle-pages-on-butterflies-of-india-website
Haneesh K. M., Subramanyam Kalluri, Hemant Ogale and Rudra Prasad
Das have recently started to format a lot of their images for the
website, covering areas of Bengaluru, Andhra Pradesh, southern
Maharashtra and West Bengal, respectively. This shall bring
important regional representation of butterflies and cover wing
pattern variation of Indian butterflies on the website.
I hope that we will touch 500 species pages and nearly 8-10,000
reference images on the website by the end of this year. Your
contributions are always appreciated, especially if you cover
species that are not on the website yet, contribute photographs from
an area that is not well represented on the website, or have
captured unusual wing pattern variation in a particular species.
Feel free to write to me <[email protected] <http://[email protected]
> > with any thoughts, suggestions and contributions.
With best wishes,
Krushnamegh.
-------------------------------------------------
Krushnamegh Kunte, PhD
Post-doctoral Research Fellow
FAS Center for Systems Biology
Harvard University
52 Oxford St., Northwest Lab Room 458.40-3
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Ph: (617) 496-0078 <tel:%28617%29%20496-0078> <tel:
%28617%29%20496-0078> , Cell: (512) 577-1370 <tel:
%28512%29%20577-1370> <tel:%28512%29%20577-1370> , Fax: (617)
495-2196 <tel:%28617%29%20495-2196> <tel:%28617%29%20495-2196>
Email: [email protected] <http://[email protected]>
Other emails: [email protected] <http://[email protected]> , [email protected]
<http://[email protected]>
Personal website: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kunte/index.htm
Indian Foundation for Butterflies: http://ifoundbutterflies.org/
Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/krushnamegh
--
Enjoy
