Congrats to Kyhl Austin, grad student in the Dept. of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, who took home Best Student Talk (and a big cash prize!) in the graduate student competition at the North American Meeting of the Lepidopterist’s Society, held at Cornell U. last month.
Kyhl's presentation (in collaboration with Dan Rubinoff, Camiel Doorenweerd, Mike San Jose and others) was on the conservation of Native Hawaiian Moths documenting the decline of many species, the extinction of some, but also the rediscovery of a few species. Kyhl then returned home to give a similar talk at the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference.
“I'm grateful to have won and happy to bring Hawai‘i insect conservation to the attention of an international audience,” he said.
Kyhl’s PhD research has in part focused on assessing the extinction status of Hawaiʻi moths, Dan explains. They accomplished this enormous feat by going over the collection records in the UH Insect Museum, the Bishop Museum, and elsewhere to assess when hundreds of species were last seen, and then estimating the extinction rates in various moth groups.
“From this, we can get a handle on which species or groups are most vulnerable and begin to draw attention to their conservation,” says Dan. “To a great degree, Hawai‘i’s insects are left out of conservation planning, and a lack of data has sometimes been used to excuse this exclusion. Kyhl's work is a move toward making insect conservation in Hawai‘i part of the discussion. By all accounts, he gave a great presentation and wowed the judges!”
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The North American (Canada, US and Mexico) Lepidopterist’s Society is the preeminent society for amateurs and scientists who work on all aspects of butterflies and moths, from basic species descriptions to conservation and ecology to genomics and gene function.