All posts by Grace Costantino

1820. Far west of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A whaleship pursues a pod of sperm whales. Suddenly, an eighty-five foot long giant charges the ship, ramming it with its head not once, but twice, caving in the bows and sending the ship to a watery grave. This is the story of the sinking of the Essex, the subject of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of Nathaniel Philbrick’s novel In the Heart of the Sea, opening this Friday.

UPDATE: A new and enhanced commenting system is being planned for BHL. The commenting system described below has been disabled as of July 5, 2016. | We are pleased to announce that we have added the ability to add comments to books in the BHL website! This new feature will allow you to easily share your discoveries while reading BHL books, highlight interesting content, post your expertise for others to see, engage in conversations about BHL books from directly within BHL, and easily discover all of the great posts from your fellow biodiversity-enthusiasts.

Problems with the custom PDFs created on the BHL website on 11/22 and 11/23 have now been resolved. The links to access any PDFs that were generated during this time should now work. If you still experience problems, please send us feedback: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact. Thanks for your patience!

Have you ever stumbled across a caterpillar and wondered what kind of adult moth or butterfly it would metamorphose into? Short of catching the caterpillar and actually observing what adult it becomes, this answer might be harder to come by than you might think. Most taxonomy and identification has been performed on the adults of various Lepidopteran species, and there are still many species whose caterpillar forms are not readily known. This is particularly true for many Australian species whose early life stages remain a scientific mystery.