CONTRIBUTING SPECIES AND BIOLOGY PAGES

Creating detailed species pages is a critical aspect of the development of the Moths of India website. If you would like to volunteer to create a species page, please email us before you start writing the text to see if anyone else is working on it, and to get specific guidance for that species. We look forward to your contributions to this free, citizen-contributed, peer-reviewed encyclopedia of Indian Moths. At this point in time, we are unable to accept contributions of moth species, which are not identified, though it is our intention to do so in the future. We would welcome submissions from people who are able to send us contributions of moths that they have identified with necessary references used for confirming species identities. Your upload will then be peer-reviewed by a group of experts before they appear on the website.

For most species pages we do not expect detailed information, although we prefer species pages to be as detailed and complete as possible. To see an example of a complete species page, visit Polytela gloriosae, the Lily Moth.

If you are contributing a species page for the first time, please check the template given below before you start writing the text. You can also download this template as a Word file. Once you have written all the text, you can submit it by email. After submission, your species page will not appear online immediately. It has to be first peer-reviewed and accepted by the Moths Biology Team members, who will then publish it online. You can make changes to your species page after it has been published online, although we recommend that you write the page just once, and do it well so that you will not need to make changes. This will also substantially reduce our work load. We are all volunteering, after all!

If you wish to add or edit information on species pages that were created by someone else, please contact us first.

You can submit media files (mainly photographs and videos) to accompany species pages. First read guidelines to submit media files.


Species page template for Moths of India:

Note that you may not have information for all the fields given below. We can publish species pages in which many fields are empty or have missing information. Also, the Moths of India team members or other contributors can fill missing information whenever they find time.

Scientific Name: Species scientific name Author, Year

English Name: Species English name

Subspecies in India: list all described Indian subspecies as follows:
(1) Subspecies scientific name Author, Year (Subspecies English name).
(... n) Subspecies scientific name Author, Year (Subspecies English name).

Identification Character(s): Wingspan: in mm (from Evans, W. H. 1932. Identification of Indian Moths). Upperside:Coloration on the upper side of wings. Underside: Coloration on the underside of wings. Additional identification characters, if any (antennae, labial palpi, legs, peculiar habits, etc).

Intraspecific Variation: Description of seasonal, sexual and individual variation.

Similar Species in India: List similar species and their distinguishing characters.

Distribution: Detailed Indian and rough global distribution of the species.
Detailed distribution of subspecies 1.
Detailed distribution of subspecies n.

Status, Habitat and Habits: Status as very common, common, uncommon, rare and very rare. Altitudinal range. Habitat range. Habits: flight, basking, feeding/mud-puddling, territoriality/hill-topping, sex-specific differences in the habits, etc.

Life Cycle: Courtship, oviposition. Morphological description of eggs, caterpillars and pupae. Habits of the early stages.

Larval Host Plants: list of larval host plants (plant family names in parentheses), with notes. One reliable, continually updated source for larval host plants is HOSTS - a Database of the World's Lepidopteran Hostplants, created by the Natural History Museum, London.

References: When extracting information from other sources, refer to as many books, research papers and websites as you can, but ensure that your references are reliable. Beware that many websites and some books often give outdated or otherwise wrong information. Try to refer either original or comprehensive sources of information on Indian Moths, since many books and websites merely copy information from previously published sources. Cite all the references from which you have extracted information, in the following style:

Books:

(1) Wynter-Blyth, M. A. 1957. Moths of the Indian Region. Bombay Natural History Society, Mumbai.
(2) Bascombe, M. J., G. Johnston and F. S. Bascombe. 1999. The Moths of Hong Kong. Academic Press, London.

Papers:

(1) de Nicéville, L. 1883. On new and little-known Rhopalocera from the Indian region. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: Part 2-Natural Science, 52: 65-91.
(2) Aduse-Poku, K., E. Vingerhoedt and N. Wahlberg. 2009. Out-of-Africa again: A phylogenetic hypothesis of the genus Charaxes (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) based on five gene regions. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 53: 463-478.

Edited books:

(1) Gunathilagaraj, K., B. A. Daniel, S. Molur and S. Walker (eds.). 2000. Handbook on Protected Invertebrates of India. Part 1- Moths Listed in Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, Schedule I Part IV. Zoo Outreach Organisation, Coimbatore.

Book chapters:

(1) Holloway, J. D. 1974. The biogeography of Indian Moths. Pp. 473-499, in M. S. Mani (ed.) Ecology and Biogeography in India. Junk, The Hague.

Websites:

(1) Inayoshi, Y. 2009. A Check List of Moths in Indo-China (chiefly from Thailand, Laos and Vietnam). URL: http://yutaka.it-n.jp/ (accessed 2010).

 


Cite this page along with its URL as:

Kunte, K.. 2022. Contributing Species Pages To Moths Of India. In Sondhi, S., Y. Sondhi, P. Roy and K. Kunte (Chief Editors). Moths of India, v. 3.30. Indian Foundation for Butterflies.

Page citation

Anonymous 2024. CONTRIBUTING SPECIES AND BIOLOGY PAGES . In Sondhi, S., Y. Sondhi, R.P. Singh, P. Roy and K. Kunte (Chief Editors). Butterflies of India, v. 3.72. Indian Foundation for Butterflies.