Harish Gaonkar

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Harish (Honnayya) S. Gaonkar (born 1946) is an Indian specialist on butterflies who contributed to the Zoological Museum at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and wrote a 1996 compilation of butterflies of Western Ghats, South India cataloging 330 species.[1][2][3] Gaonkar was born in Karwar district, India.[citation needed] Gaonkar earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. [citation needed]

Born and raised in Hanehalli, Honnayya completed his high school from Anandashram High School, Bankikodla in 1962. In 2001 Harish Gaonkar was a Scientific Associate of the Natural History Museum in London.[4] In the 2004 "Global Butterfly Names" proposal to the ECAT programme of GBIF submitted by J. Mallet, Professor of Biological Diversity, University College London, concerning a major collaboration between developed and developing countries backed by the Natural History Museum, London, to provide an open, online, complete and up-to-date database of all ~80,000 names applied to ~17,500 butterfly species" Gaonkar was described as one of the named NHM staff members, postdoctorate students and scientific associates "with leading skills in butterfly taxonomy" identified as "representing a critical mass of professional expertise unmatched elsewhere".[5]

He is cited as the source of the list of butterflies endemic to Sri Lanka at Michael and Nancy van der Poorten's website "Butterflies & Dragonflies of Sri Lanka" in a personal communication of information from a work "The Atlas of the Butterflies of the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka", Natural History Museum, London, apparently still in preparation in Aug 2009.[6] Gaonkar is frequently cited explaining the origin of the name of the Asian Mormon swallowtail butterflies. He wrote that "the origins of giving common English names to organisms, particularly butterflies for tropical species started in India around the mid 19th century. The naming of Mormons evolved slowly. I think the first to get such a name was the Common Mormon (Papilio polytes), because it had three different females, a fact that could only have been observed in the field, and this they did in India. The name obviously reflected the . . . Mormon sect in America, which as we know, practiced polygamy."[7]

Selected books and publications

  • Gaonkar, H. 1995. An Annotated Bibliography of the Butterflies of the Indian Region. The Natural History of the Butterflies of the Indian Region. Bibliography. Copenhagen, London, Bangalore.[8]
  • Gaonkar, Harish (1996) Butterflies of the Western Ghats, India (including Sri Lanka) - A Biodiversity Assessment of a threatened mountain system. A report submitted to the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Bangalore, India, 86pp
  • A New Subspecies of Eurema andersoni (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) from South India, O. Yata, H. Gaonkar - Entomological science, 1999 - ci.nii.ac.jp
  • The Arhopala butterflies described by Fabricius: A. centaurus is from Java, A. democritus from Phuket (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae), Entomological science, Volume 9 Issue 3, Pages 295 - 311, Published Online: 27 Sep 2006, Richard I. Vane-Wright and Harish Gaonkar, Department of Entomology, the Natural History Museum, London, UK (September 2006).[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Parag Rangnekar, Omkar Dharwadkar, "Three additions to the known butterfly (Lepidoptera: Rhopalocera and Grypocera) fauna of Goa, India", Journal of Threatened Taxa, May 2009, 1(5): 298-299 299
  2. ↑ Asian Mormon Butterflies
  3. ↑ The Hindu : Butterfly paradise
  4. ↑ Butterfly India
  5. ↑ Butterfly name
  6. ↑ Butterflies
  7. ↑ Nrews Release
  8. ↑ ZMUC commonweb
  9. ↑ entomologicalscience
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