Harish Gaonkar

Harish (Honnayya) S. Gaonkar (born 1946 in

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 cataloguing 330 species.^[1]^[2] Gaonkar earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.^{[citation needed}

]

Life and career

Education and work in London

Born and raised in Hanehalli, Gaonkar completed his high school education at Anandashram High School, Bankikodla in 1962 ^{[citation needed]}. In 2001 Gaonkar was a scientific associate of the Natural History Museum in London.^[3] In 2004, Gaonkar collaborated on a "Global Butterfly Names" proposal to the ECAT programme of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The proposal was submitted by James Mallet, professor of biological diversity at 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 the about 80,000 names applied to about 17,500 butterfly species. Gaonkar was described as one of the named NHM staff members, postdoctoral students and scientific associates "with leading skills in butterfly taxonomy" and identified as "representing a critical mass of professional expertise unmatched elsewhere".^[4]

In Sri Lanka

Gaonkar 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 August 2009.

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."^[6]

Selected books and publications

Gaonkar, H. (1995) An Annotated Bibliography of the Butterflies of the Indian Region Including Pakistan India Nepal Bangladesh Bhutan Sri Lanka and North Burma
OCLC 488215574^[7]

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, 86 pp
O. Yata, H. Gaonkar, "A New Subspecies of Eurema andersonii (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) from South India", Entomological Science, 1999 - ci.nii.ac.jp
Vane-Wright, Richard I. and Gaonkar, Harish, Department of Entomology, Natural History Museum, London. "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 September 2006, link

References

^ 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
^ Asian Mormon Butterflies
^ Butterfly India
^ Butterfly name
^ Butterflies Archived 2009-11-26 at the Wayback Machine
^ News Release
^ ZMUC commonweb

[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] Butterfly India

[4] Butterfly name

[5] Butterflies Archived 2009-11-26 at the Wayback Machine

[6] News Release

[7] ZMUC commonweb

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[6]

Life and career

Education and work in London

In Sri Lanka

Selected books and publications

See also

References