Some items from your list seem merely like differences of opinion to me, and some others are not errors at all. But I do not wish to haggle with you over detail. Amen to “When someone talks about conservation, they should be thorough and technically right, if they are serious about it.”, but understand that this article is written by an Indian journalist for an environmental magazine, not written by a scientist or a conservationist for a scientific journal. It’s a matter of perspective, and the relative merit of a popular article that spreads some message albeit with a few errors, versus no popular article at all. If you insist of thoroughness and technical perfection, wildlife magazines such as Sanctuary Asia and even National Geographic would cease to exist. One always hopes for better reporting, though.
Anyway! I will turn to butterflies once again. I have some more photos to send to the group today. Krushnamegh. ________________________________ From: Kishen Das <[email protected]> Reply-To: butterflyindia <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:50:19 -0400 To: butterflyindia <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [ButterflyIndia] BOI now has 412 species pages, 146 lifecycles and 6,000 photos: 8 July '11 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] <http://[email protected]> > Reply-To: butterflyindia <[email protected] <http://[email protected]> > Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:25:24 -0400 To: butterflyindia <[email protected] <http://[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] <http://[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> <tel:07627-265309 <tel:07627-265309> > day time phone only ________________________________ From: "Kunte, Krushnamegh" <[email protected] <http://[email protected]> > To: butterflyindia <[email protected] <http://[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] <http://[email protected]> > Reply-To: butterflyindia <[email protected] <http://[email protected]> > Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 19:57:16 -0400 To: butterflyindia <[email protected] <http://[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] <http://[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]> <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> <tel:%28617%29%20496-0078> , Cell: (512) 577-1370 <tel:%28512%29%20577-1370> <tel:%28512%29%20577-1370> <tel:%28512%29%20577-1370> , Fax: (617) 495-2196 <tel:%28617%29%20495-2196> <tel:%28617%29%20495-2196> <tel:%28617%29%20495-2196> Email: [email protected] <http://[email protected]> <http://[email protected]> Other emails: [email protected] <http://[email protected]> <http://[email protected]> , [email protected] <http://[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
