Skip Blanchard

Gainesville, Florida, USA

My full name is Orland Joseph Blanchard, Jr. I am not an expert, but I have had some training and have been collecting beetles for decades. I am a botanist by profession (Ph.D., Cornell; now retired), but I minored in insect taxonomy, in part because of a long-time interest in butterflies and moths, and when I took a graduate course in Lepidoptera and Coleoptera I got hooked on beetles. I have been collecting beetles for 44 years now (as of 2013) and have accumulated over 19,000 specimens. At present I am a courtesy curator at the University of Florida Herbarium of the Florida Museum of Natural History and a research associate at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods, both in Gainesville. I consult BugGuide almost daily and learn something every time. I stopped photographing natural history subjects some time ago, when I felt that I had most of what I needed for teaching purposes; hence my zero contributions of photographs to BugGuide. Now and then I contribute identifications of beetles, butterflies, and moths, but usually in tentative terms (“looks like…,” “maybe…,” “reminds me of…”) as befits my non-expert status. So I have to admit that on BugGuide I am more of a taker than a giver. What a great site!