The Division of Entomology
has about one million specimens to its name. More than one third of
these are in the Order Lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths. In
October 2003 Dr. Thomas R. Manley of Port Treverton, Pennsylvania,
presented one of the larger private butterfly and moth collections in
the United States to the Yale Peabody Museum.
The
Thomas R. Manley Lepidoptera Collection comprises approximately 65,000
specimens, most from North America. Tom Manley is well known to the
Entomology Division. In the early 1960s he came to Yale as a John Hay
Fellow to pursue an interest in horticulture, but became enthralled
with insects after working with then Curator Charles Remington. An
assiduous field worker, Dr. Manley’s nearly 40 years of Lepidoptera
collecting and breeding has always involved local lepidopterists as
well as his students at Bloomsburg State University, in central
Pennsylvania, where he spent his teaching career as a biology professor.
The make up of the collection mirrors Dr. Manley’s butterfly and moth
passions. His early love was silk moths, especially the Io (or
bull’s-eye) moth, Automeris io. Through
careful breeding and backcrossing experiments, he worked out the
genetics of many hindwing eyespot patterns found in this handsome moth.
At about the time he began working with Io moths, he also used mass
sampling to document morphological patterns at the populational level,
traveling widely throughout North America to collect in butterfly
hybrid zones, isolated mountain ranges, and along altitudinal and
geographic gradients. He was particularly fond of Montana, and made
repeated trips to document the fauna of the Judith Mountains in Fergus
County.
Dr. Manley also tracked the spread of
melanics (dark forms) in Pennsylvania in certain moth species—the
Geometridae (inchworms) and Noctuidae (millers). His work and that of
Ted Sargent at the University of Massachusetts assembled some of the
better long-term data on melanic frequencies in North American moths
(Sargent also has donated his material to the Peabody). Most recently,
Manley focused his mass sampling on the genus Parnassius, tail-less swallowtails of the alpine zones of western U.S. and Canada, to collect from all the known Parnassius populations in western North America.
The Thomas R. Manley Lepidoptera Collection complements and strengthens
the already rich Lepidoptera collections at the Yale Peabody Museum.
—Larry Gall
The Yale Peabody Museum’s collections are available to legitimate
researchers for scholarly use. Loans are issued to responsible
individuals at established institutions. Loans and access to the
collection can be arranged through the Collections Manager.
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