The Heliconiid Identification Project (H.I.P)

......."Both of those are melpomene I think - again hybrids with weird combination of genes but mainly from the east Ecuador hybrid zone around Puyo between H. melpomene plesseni and H. melpomene malleti."

- Chris Jiggins 

First off long time no see!! Haven't posted for forever I know.....life's complicated. XD  Secondly I eat, sleep, and shit, butterflies. ^^ More so then ever before.......♥♥♥

And now on to the fun stuff. 

So a while back (sometime last year) I had wrote about my frustrations that there weren't any guides/books on the Heliconiidae. I mean these butterflies are so versatile and there's practically nothing (book wise except for ONE) on them. -_-. So I have taken matters in to my own hands........

.....until someone wises up I have consulted every PDF I could get my hands on these fascinating butterflies and have contacted 2 extremely wonderful experts one of which has ID'd a bunch for me and is quoted here for future reference (hope you don't mind ^^):

Is believed to be a H. melpomene x H. cydno hybrid. Possible ID made by the wonderful Chris Jiggins



Believed to be a melpomene........neither one of us has seen anything like this before. 0_0



" Heliconius erato cyrbia x H. himera is my guess" - Chris Jiggins

Photo of said H. erato cyrbia x H. himera hybrid. Very proud of this one. ^^*

I've also taken it upon myself to do this:

"Heliconius and Related Genera Plates (Holzinger & Holzinger)" which apparently is from the only actual book on them. 12 more pages to go and I'm done!

2 sets of ink cartridges this thing cost me. XD But it's worth every bit of it. It's been something I've been thinking about doing for the longest time. The NHM actually inspired me to do this after seeing their guide to all the butterflies in the exhibit that they could wind up having. 

Did I mention how much I love that place? ^^♥ There shall be more to come.......this isn't over until they're "all" identified. :P  Fun fun fun!

ɛïɜ