Inventory of Caterpillars, Parasitoids and Food Plants of a Costa Rican Dry, Cloud, and Rain Forest: Caterpillar and Species Discovery, and Setting Them Up for Society

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The project is 5 years (2005-2010) of an ongoing biodiversity inventory (= setting up for use by all sectors of society) of all 9,600 species of macrocaterpillars (4% of the world caterpillar biota), their food plant relationships, and their parasitoids (tachinid flies, parasitic wasps, nematodes, fungi), in the 470 square miles of tropical dry forest and its contiguous rain forest and cloud forest in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica - effectively a huge national park. It ranges from 0-2000 m elevation and includes all three of the major tropical terrestrial ecosystems other than desert and paramo. The caterpillars are found and reared by a team of 19 experienced Costa Rican parataxonomists with training and guidance by the PI. The resulting data - tens of thousands of images and their associated natural history - is both published and available on the project public web site http://janzen.sas.upenn.edu.The information gathered is a) the base of a global pilot project demonstrating tropical conservation through non-damaging biodiversity development by local society, b) the provision of the natural history and trophic relationships of 4% of the world's butterfly and moth biodiversity via the internet, and c) major stimulus and data for the new initiative to DNA barcode the world's species for easy identification by anyone anywhere anytime, fast, leading to a massive increase in global bioliteracy.