donhe

I am 87 and retired, and live in Leamington Spa, UK. I have been many things : a Chemist (D. Phil. Oxford 'Some Chemical Applications of Magnetic Resonance', 1963), a Microwave Antenna Designer, an Astronomer, a Numerical Analyst, and a professional Ballroom Dancing Teacher. Currently I am the surviving webmaster of: http://lepidoptera.butterflyhouse.com.au/

My friend, colleague and mentor : academic entomologist Stella Crossley and I both emigrated from UK with our respective families to Australia around 1968. I came to a position at Sydney University, Stella to a post at Monash University. We bought houses with gardens respectively in Sydney and Melbourne, and we were both astonished at the variety of caterpillars we found in our gardens. We tried asking local museums  what they were, but were dismissed  after being told that most of the Australian Lepidoptera taxonomy was undertaken at the British Museum on set adult specimens sent back from Australia, and very little was known of their larvae. So Stella and I started photographing and rearing our caterpillars to get adults, and then getting those identified, and in due course we wrote a manuscript for a picture book, which we were going to call '100 Common Australian Caterpillars'.

We toted it around half a dozen publishers, but they each said basically "Who wants a book on grubs? Ugh", so we put it on a shelf, and there it lay for 20 years.

Then, around 1995, my University Department said the staff should each put a webpage about ourselves so that the students would get to know us. I dutifully wrote one, with a mention that I reared caterpillars for a hobby. Then people started emailing me with photos of caterpillars and moths and butterflies, so I started adding informative webpages to my University website on the caterpillars that we had reared. Stella and I decided we were not going to make a fortune publishing our book, so we might as well put the whole thing on the web, and also add the photos that we were being sent. And so the Australian Lepidoptera website was born.

In due course I retired from the University, and the Butterfly House at Coffs Harbour kindly agreed to host the webpages on their own website. Stella sadly died in 2007, so now I try to keep the website up-to-date remotely with a lot of help from many kind people who know a lot more entomology than I do, and I keep adding more webpages about more and more species as more and more people take photos and give permission to use them.

Moderator categories

donhe is a moderator for the following categories:

Moths (Lepidoptera)  |  Anthelid moths (Anthelidae) Case moths (Psychidae) Concealer moths (Oecophoridae) Curved-horn moths (all Gelechioidea except Oecophoridae) Emperor moths (Saturniidae) Geometer moths (Geometridae) Hawk moths (Sphingidae) Noctuoid moths (except Arctiinae) Other moths Pyralid or Snout Moths (Pyralidae & Crambidae) Sun moths (Castniidae) Swift and Ghost moths (Hepialidae) Tiger moths (Arctiinae) Tortricid moths (Tortricidae) Wood moths (Cossidae)

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  All regions 15455 Canberra & Southern Tablelands 12554 Southern Highlands 71 Albury, Wodonga 10 South Coast 755 Greater Sydney 11 Hunter Region 1 Central West NSW 4 New England 1 Far West New South Wales 1 New South Wales North Coast 47 Hume 2 Greater Melbourne 23 Barwon South West 965 Grampians 8 Loddon Mallee 41 Greater Brisbane 936 Wide Bay 1 North Queensland 3 Tasmania 3 South East South Australia 3 Mid West Western Australia 2 South West Western Australia 1 Central and Barkley 1 Outback South Australia 11

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Fungi

• Caps on stems; gills below caps [mushrooms or mushroom-like]
• Caps on stems; pores below caps [boletes & stemmed polypores]
  • Boletes - Fleshy texture, stems central (more-or-less)
  • Polypores - Non-fleshy texture, stems central or lateral
• Caps on stems; teeth below caps
• Caps on stems; none of the above
  • Caps conical/spherical & deeply pitted [morels]
  • Caps saddle-like to markedly convoluted [false morels]
  • Caps funnel-like
  • Caps otherwise
• Caps, gills below, no stem & usually on wood [stemless mushrooms & the like]
  • Furry, white or greyish upper surfaces
  • Gills connected by cross veins
  • Other caps, gills below, no stem
• Shelf-like to hoof-like & usually on wood
  • Pored or somewhat maze-like on underside [bracket polypores]
  • Teeth on underside
  • Underside smooth or wrinkled/roughened <Stereum etc>
• Puffballs & the like
  • Simple spore sac, with an apical hole [puffballs]
  • Spore sac on a star-like base [earthstars]
  • Fruitbody thick walled, splitting from the top
  • Fruitbody walls break away to expose the spores
  • Other puffballs, etc (& the unknowns)
• Stinkhorns: with a smelly, brownish spore slime
  • Stinkhorns, radiating arms atop a stem
  • Stinkhorns, cage-like
  • Stinkhorns, some other shape- and miscellaneous
• Clubs or stalks (maybe a forked or broader apex)
  • Clubs/stalks on soil
  • Clubs/stalks on wood or on leaf/twig litter
  • Clubs/stalks on invertebrates
• Coralloid fungi, markedly branched
• Disk-like to cup-like
  • Cup with one or more 'eggs' inside [birds nest fungi and cannonball fungus]
  • Cups or disks - with no 'eggs'
• Convoluted to brain-like [Brain jelly & look-alikes]
• Fungal galls, other rusts, leaf spots, etc
  • Fungal galls
  • Other rusts, leaf spots, sooty moulds
• Other fungi on wood
  • Jelly-like; smooth, featureless surface
  • Spherical or cobblestone-like or spotted/pimpled crust <perithecial>
  • Other black fungi <hysterothecial>
  • Other non-black fungi
• Truffles
• Other fungi
  • Moulds
  • Not moulds
• Uncategorised Fungi