Monday, January 25th, 2021, at 7 pm: A Life Spent Chasing Moths & Their Caterpillars, and Discovering So Much More, presented by Alma Solis.
I will relate how my interest in moths was kickstarted at a cloud forest in northeastern Mexico. This fieldwork led to my life-long interest in the Pyraloidea, or snout moths, one of the largest and most diverse groups of Lepidoptera. I will describe the importance of pyraloids to agriculture, mostly as pests of crops, but also as biological control for noxious plants, such as the cactus moth. The adults vary widely in size and can be measured in centimeters or millimeters, and the larvae eat plants, animals, and even beeswax. The most unique pyraloids are those with caterpillars adapted to living in and around water; a film will be shown of an aquatic pyraloid caterpillar that lives its entire life under water.
Alma Solis was born and grew up in south Texas where she attended Texas Southmost College in Brownsville and developed an interest in biology. For her thesis research at UT Austin, she studied lepidopteran leaf miners feeding on deciduous trees in a cloud forest in northeastern Mexico and expanded her study to include light-caught Lepidoptera. She then specialized on pyraloids for her dissertation research at the University of Maryland at College Park. Alma has been a Research Scientist in the Systematic Entomology Laboratory, Agriculture Research Service, USDA, and Curator of the Pyraloidea and related families at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., for over 30 years; she was Research Leader of the laboratory for ten of those years. She has published more than 100 research papers and book chapters on the classification of Pyralidae or snout moths. She has conducted fieldwork and research in major museums worldwide and is President of theThe Lepidopterists’ Society.
Alma is married to Jason P. W. Hall, a riodinid butterfly specialist. An NPR interview with the couple aired in 2012 to highlight their butterfly garden in Silver Spring, Maryland.
NPR: Rare Specimens: An Unusual Match-Up In Entomologyhttps://www.npr.org/2012/09/23/161645461/rare-specimens-an-unusual-match-up-in-entomology
or: http://n.pr/3iF0fhL
Alma's recent President’s Letter to the Lepidopterists’ Society includes intriguing details of her time at famed Rancho del Cielo Biological Station in southern Tamaulipas.
http://texasento.net/LepSoc_Presidents_letter_2020.pdf
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