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This is the second part of the series I have undertaken as a Scientific
Associate of the Natural History Museum, with access to collections, libraries
and with working space and facilities provided in the Department of Entomology.
I am grateful also for continued use of a microscope and computer equipment on
loan from the International Institute of Entomology (now part of CABI
Bioscience).
I have enjoyed the support of a part-time research assistant, Núria
López
Mercader, generously funded by The Friends of the Natural History Museum.
My thanks are due to them and to Núria, who has undertaken a considerable amount
of literature research, translation and dissection. Text checking and help with
preparation of the figures has been provided by her successor, Maia Vaswani.
Much support in seeing the series through to publication in Malaysia continues
to be provided by Henry Barlow, who also markets the reprint edition and
underwrites the cost of the colour plates. The colour plates were photographed
by Bernard D'Abrera. I am very grateful to my wife, Phillipa, for the long hours
she put in at the keyboard to produce camera-ready copy for the text and figure
legends.
The work would have been impossible without the full access, mentioned
above, to the collections and other facilities in The Natural History Museum,
London. Material was also examined in, or from, the Australian National Insect
Collection, Canberra, the Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt, the Zoologische
Staatssammlung, Munich (ZSM), the B.P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, the University
Museum, Oxford, the Forest Research Centre collection, Sepilok and the FRIM
collection, Kepong. I am grateful to the staff of all these institutions for
their assistance, and Chey Vun Khen and Jurie Intachat of the last two for
access to unpublished host records. Such records were also gleaned from data
taken from material submitted to IIE over the years for identification (See
Systematic
Account).
Ulf Buchsbaum kindly dissected drepanids from the Heterocera Sumatrana
material in ZSM, likewise Marianne Horak for an epiplemine type species, and
Shen-Horn Yen generously provided access to unpublished work by himself and
Y.-J. Chen on the Epipleminae of Taiwan. Similar generous access to data on the
biology of the palm-feeding drepanids of Peninsular Malaysia was given by Helmut
Steiner.
Thanks are also due to the following for their critical comments on all
or part of the text: Ulf Buchsbaum, Ted Edwards, Marianne Horak, Lutz Kobes,
David Lees, Joël
Minet, Malcolm Scoble, Chris Wilkinson and Shen-Horn Yen.
Frequent discussions with Tony Galsworthy, studying the macrolepidoptera of Hong
Kong in parallel, led to resolution of several knotty problems of identification
and to enhancement of our knowledge of various taxa to the benefit of both our
research programmes. The work also benefited from interactions at various times
with Ulf Buchsbaum, David Carter, Chey Vun Khen and Jurie Intachat.
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