Akito Kawahara, an assistant professor and curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, explains why he became interested in butterflies and moths and why he loves this area of research.
Interview and videos produced by Peter Byatt for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Akito Kawahara: I got interested in science when I was growing up in Japan. I was born in New York, but I lived part of my life in Japan and when I was a child I actually went to a butterfly house just like this one here at the Florida Museum and I got really interested in the butterflies just watching them, watching how they feed on flowers, just seeing them flying around and then I got interested in trying to collect them and try to understand more about them.
So I started my own personal collection and that really opened the doors to my interest in science and from then on I started to use that collection as the basis to build it and make it larger and very much like the Florida Museum here, we have a huge collection, you know trying to build my collection and and expand and learn more about butterflies and then that’s when I switched from from butterflies to moths.
I’d discovered that there’s so many more species of moths than butterflies and realized that very little is known about moths and so that got me very interested in, you know, you could be one of the first people in the world to actually learn something about this and make a contribution to science, and that got me really excited and that’s how I got involved in this.
Learn more about the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum.
Learn more about the Kawahara Lab at the Florida Museum.