Gary N. Ross

When he began his graduate work in biology at Louisiana State University in 1962, Gary Noel Ross went on a six-month expedition to investigate butterfly populations in Mexico’s relatively unknown Sierra de Tuxtla. Little did he realize that he would discover a new species in the process. This butterfly, named Ross’s metalmark in his honor, became the subject of his master’s thesis and is the basis of his article in this issue. His doctoral dissertation dealt with all of the region’s butterflies. Ross has also done fieldwork elsewhere in North and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

[Update 2006:] At the time this article was published, Ross was studying the natural dyes and biological motifs used in the weavings of the Zapotec Indian culture of Oaxaca, Mexico. That research became the subject of “The Bug in the Rug” (March 1986). Among his other articles that have appeared in Natural History is “Butterfly Wrangling in Louisiana” (May, 1995), which won the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. A resident of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he formerly was professor of biology at Southern University, Ross is now a research associate at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the University of Florida, Gainesville.