For his work on Native Hawaiian moth conservation, a graduate student in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) took home “best student talk” at the Annual Meeting of The Lepidopterists’ Society’s graduate student competition held at Cornell University in July. (Lepidopterists study butterflies and moths.)
Kyhl Austin’s presentation, in collaboration with CTAHR Professor Daniel Rubinoff and Junior Researchers Camiel Doorenweerd and Mike San Jose, documented the decline of many Native Hawaiian moth species, with the extinction of some and the rediscovery of others. Austin then returned home to give a similar talk at the Hawaiʻi Conservation Conference.
“I’m grateful to have won and happy to bring Hawaiʻi insect conservation to the attention of an international audience,” said Austin, of the CTAHR Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences.
Austin’s research focused on assessing the patterns and timing of extinctions of Hawaiian moths. He accomplished this by looking through the historical and modern 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,” said Rubinoff. “To a great degree, Hawaiʻi’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 Hawaiʻi part of the discussion. By all accounts, he gave a great presentation and wowed the judges!”
The Lepidopterists’ Society is the preeminent society for amateurs and scientists who work on all aspects of butterflies and moths, from new species descriptions to conservation and ecology to genomics and gene function.
