A leading Lepidopterist

Like a moth to light, Snyder is drawn to moths, butterflies

John Snyder has found a curious way of combining a lifelong hobby and his professional training. Almost any day the biology professor can be found spending time on the Internet searching for images of insects — moths and butterflies, to be more exact.

From a nondescript office on the second floor of Plyler Hall, Snyder maintains the world’s largest on-line collection of moths and butterflies. The site, called "Web Images of North American Moth Species," can be accessed at http://www.furman.edu/~snyder/leplist

The site features close to 2,000 links to photographs of moth and butterfly species, both caterpillars and adults. Hundreds of Web sites containing information on moths and butterflies are also linked from another page for which Snyder is webmaster — the Lepidopterists’ Society home page http://www.furman.edu/~snyder/snyder/lep/

Together, these two sites are arguably the world’s leading resources for butterfly and moth enthusiasts. Snyder, who has maintained the moth images page for nearly two years, painstakingly logs each link and constantly reviews the many on-line pages, looking for dead links and other imperfections.

In North America alone there are more than 10,000 known butterfly and moth species, and entomologists are discovering more all the time. So attempting to catalogue them all is kind of like swimming against a tide, says Snyder, who joined the biology faculty in 1971.

"The site will probably never be complete," he says. "The ideal site would have links to all species and would include a search engine."

But these tiny imperfections don’t seem to bother amateur and professional entomologists worldwide who have made the site one of their regular rest stops on the information superhighway.

In fact, Snyder fields at least one unsolicited e-mail query a day from individuals trying to identify a species of butterfly or moth. When the insects are most active during the summer, the number of electronic questions reaches five or six a day.

Snyder’s favorite query came last summer when an Army recruit from Idaho e-mailed that her drill sergeant had found a dead moth in an area she was responsible for keeping spotless.

"The drill sergeant told her that unless she could identify the species of the discovered moth within 24 hours, she was going to have to bury the insect with full military honors," laughs Snyder. "I gave her a real technical sounding name. I guess it satisfied the sergeant."

Snyder’s fascination with moths and butterflies began at Kent Junior High in Akron, Ohio, where Mrs. Caldwell, a science teacher, required her class to compile a collection of insects.

"I categorized and named them. That’s when I first came to realize that there was so much diversity," says Snyder, who is also the curator of Furman’s insect collection (http://www.furman.edu/~snyder/butterfly/). "I think I even won a ribbon for my collection at a science fair."

Snyder went on to attend Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he majored in biology, and earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in zoology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

By the 1980s — after more than a decade of studying antibacterial enzymes of amphibians — Snyder had renewed his boyhood interest in insects. His current research focuses on fluorescent molecules found in moths. The study combines his background in molecular biology and entomology.