About Us

Antennae Inc. was created to supply the world’s collectors and artists with high quality unique species of insects and arachnids that come from environmentally conscious suppliers.

Curious about these beautiful and delicate beings since I can remember, I spent my time watching and studying insects. Since I was 5 years old I collected butterflies and learned from a "door-to-door" butterfly salesman by the age of 6 how to pin them, a discipline I mastered. Today I am able to boast an impressive collection that rivals some of the finest museums around the world.

The hobby turned into a business in 1998. I started out with “Tetramorph Preservation Services”, a small business that later was converted into “Lepidopteran” (2002-2004).

I have been to many countries world over to collect and study butterflies and insects in their natural habitats. Throughout the years I witnessed first hand the depletion of butterfly populations in different regions. It was a very disheartening experience.
Seeing land owners slash and burn the jungle on their land to convert it to an agricultural crop producing property like coconuts or rubber showed me that this was the primary culprit for the dwindling butterfly and insect populations.

Wanting to help to sustain them I set out to begin farming programs that kept the rain forest untouched while still providing a livelihood that was better than mono cultural crops. In 1991 I was given permission to start a sustainable development butterfly-breeding project in Sri Lanka. Thousands of butterflies were bred and 10% were released into the wild. Since the tremendous success of this project, I also developed operations in Kerala, India and Puebla, Mexico and established relationships with pre-existing farms in Papua New Guinea, Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Tanzania and the Republic of Central Africa. Since 1998, the governments in both India and Sri Lanka have changed and so did the permission to run the farms. The land has been cleared and rubber and tea are being grown. I can understand that they needed to do so as they simply needed to survive. The underlying point to this story for me that gives me happiness is that for 7 years, the farms were operational and sustained themselves. At least for that time, my efforts left a positive environmental footprint for the butterfly diversity of North-Western Sri Lanka and Southern India.

The art work I create takes up most of my time. If you are interested in learning more about it, please take a look at my personal website where my art is displayed. There you will also find a video of me, talking about the process of what it is that I do to create the art pieces. I also make small shadow box frames for those that want to buy small gifts. On average, I pin about 5000 butterflies a year for the special orders that come in. Between these jobs, I go through quality control and identify the species in new shipments so that all data are accurate and complete for ANTENNAE's online store.

Presently my wife and I operate and run Antennae Inc. In the midst of all that, we are creating a non-profit foundation for the preservation and conservation of insect species.
We go to schools to do presentations on various insect and arachnid species depending on what the kids are learning at the time. It is really important to me to inspire, teach and motivate young children about these amazing creatures so that they will have some desire as adults to want to help conserve them too. My dream of duplicating sustainable butterfly and insect farming projects in other countries is alive and well. We are on our way to creating something meaningful for these wonderful creatures in many countries once again.

In the months ahead, we endeavour to create the ground work for a number of sustainable development programs in a number of countries. Our Foundation will be seeking sponsors and funds to help seed these projects. Look in the coming months to see what new and amazing things will be happening.