This ‘hidden figure’ of entomology fought for civil rights

On the drive to high school, on the first sign of trouble, “she made me get on the floorboard,” says the older son of pioneering Black entomologist Margaret S. Collins. He’s remembering the tense 1956 civil rights bus boycott in Tallahassee, Fla. As soon as young Herbert had wriggled to a safer spot on the ground of the car, his mom would stomp the gas pedal and hope to outrun the police over again.

Collins, on her morning drives to Herbert’s school and then on to her university faculty job, used to be giving rides to people boycotting town’s racially segregated public buses. Tallahassee’s seven-month boycott isn’t as famous as the one in 1st viscount montgomery of alamein, Ala., which started in late 1955, but the Tallahassee boycott also stirred fierce white pushback. The legal system made an example of 21 other local activists offering rides, charging them with running a profitable city transportation system without getting a franchise from town to achieve this. The targeted activists were each fined $500 and, if caught in criminal activity within the course of the following year, would spend 60 days in prison.

Herbert still remembers crouching within the car, watching his mother’s foot on the gas. “I used to be like, ‘You’re going to make a hole within the ground in case you press it a lot harder,’ ” he says. They never caught her though.

“I suspect her life would make a superior movie,” says entomologist Jessica Ware of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

In her science, Collins really good in termites, studying a ramification the specimens which are now less than Ware’s care on the museum. Though these insects are perchance best known for the damage they're ready to do to human-built structures, Collins’ interest used to be now not within the service of pest keep an eye on. Instead, she studied the vast, odd universe of termite diversity, glorying within the variations one of many many arena’s 2,000-plus species. A couple of those species are not any further likely than a human to eat soggy porch steps.

Though she started by studying termite resistance to dehydration within the lab, Collins in time established herself as a skilled field biologist. She explored in no lower than 10 countries outside america and used to be recognized as an authority on termites of the Caribbean. Both Collins and Ware, a generation apart, made expeditions into Guyana’s rainforests, rich in insects of interest to science but also in snakes, prowling jaguars and other excitements. Field biology is now not for the faint-hearted.

As of late, Collins also gets recognized for overcoming the many frictions that came with working within the largely white male world of U.S. midcentury biology. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1949, made Collins “handiest the 1/3 Black woman zoologist within the u.s. of a,” no lower than with a Ph.D., writes science historian Wini Warren in Black Females Scientists within america. And that would make Collins The the u.s. of a’s first Black female entomologist to earn such an improved degree.

Captivated by termites

Collins’ childhood shared some details with the life of mathematician Katherine Johnson (SN: 5/25/21), portrayed within the beloved 2016 book and picture Hidden Figures, about Black women folk at NASA who performed key calculations for early space flight (SN: 12/23/16). Both Johnson and Margaret James Strickland Collins (her name reflecting two marriages) grew up in West Virginia. Both women folk skipped grades, went early to the same high school and then the same college.

Born Margaret James in 1922 as the lively, precocious fourth of 5 youngsters, Collins grew up within the faculty town of Institute, W.Va., finding a ramification nation-state to explore nature. Her superpower used to be now not exotic math but reading. She learned just by sitting on the lap of whichever parent did the nightly story time. At age 6, Collins used to be allowed to borrow any book she may perchance reach within the library of West Virginia State College, a historically Black institution.

Her father, Rollins James, taught agriculture there. He had worked with crop pioneer George Washington Carver and had a master’s degree from Tuskegee Institute. Her mother, Luella, had wanted to alter into an archaeologist, Collins told Warren in all places an interview. Luella used to be a passionate reader, “self reliant,” even “rebellious,” Collins said.

Collins may perchance without a doubt question authority. Herbert, the son who crouched on the car floor, remembers her saying about childhood Christmas merriment: “My parents undoubtedly tried to make me think that a reindeer may perchance fly at some stage in the air.” Having seen a picture of a reindeer, “I knew there’s just no way this reindeer may perchance fly.”

Both math prodigy Johnson, born in 1918, and reindeer-skeptic Collins went to West Virginia State College, now West Virginia State University.

Collins had planned to major in biology, but lessons she described to Warren as “stereotyped, dull and malodorous” and a “gruff and frightening” teacher sapped her interest. She lost her scholarship. Still, summers working kept her in college long enough to stumble upon a biology professor who helped her ID a water creature she’d revealed in a stream, thereby renewing her interest. Then came World War II.

These were uncertain times. In July 1942, she married Bernard Strickland, a premed student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Within months, though, he used to be drafted for defense force service.

After finishing her undergraduate degree the following year, with a first-rate in biology and minors in physics and German, she headed to the University of Chicago. Though the state of West Virginia had a publicly sponsored graduate school, it had handiest started admitting Black students in 1940 (with the whopping total of three, including Katherine Johnson).

Collins received a $100 twenty five stipend from the state, she later told biographer Warren, nevertheless it wouldn’t go very far. To help fund grad school, she worked an evening shift at a ball bearing factory. After rent and other expenses, she may perchance have enough money handiest 10 meals a week — and she or he used to be often exhausted.

However it used to be there that her life took on a brand new direction. In an opportunity conversation at class registration, she met American biologist and termite maestro Alfred Emerson. Emerson used to be “an actual giant in termite research,” says Nan-Yao Su, a specialist in termites and one in every of Collins’ later collaborators, now on the University of Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.

Collins used to be captivated by the course she took with Emerson. He heard of her financial pinch and offered an assistantship that included caring for the termite collection. This began her lifelong fascination.

Termites rank among nature’s big name soil engineers in a number of tropical and subtropical ecosystems. Plus, like bees and ants, they're ready to create complex societies with really good castes and, in some species, weird body parts. A collection of the Nasutitermes species Collins studied, some termite soldiers defend themselves by squirting sticky glop from their heads through a glue gun structure “like a less-floppy elephant nose,” Ware says.

Collins’ Ph.D. thesis used to be her first publication on termite tolerance for water loss, which appeared in 1950 in Ecology. Of three species collected within the Chicago area, she found that the one which also ranged widely across the more arid West may perchance survive longer in drier air. The thickness of a waxy outer layer played a job but didn’t give an explanation for each of the diversities within the species’ ranges.

This used to be one small little bit of knowledge for what are giant questions about biodiversity. How can kin indirectly change into so diverse? And the way does evolution create the wild patchwork of species covering the planet? With so many forms across the arena, termites are great for exploring these questions.

Though Emerson supported her Ph.D. work, he had his prejudices too. He refused to let Collins sign up for an expedition documenting vegetation and animals within the Pacific’s Marshall Islands after the war. His objections were just “good ole boy stuff,” sniffs Vernard Lewis, a termite entomologist on the University of California, Berkeley and a Collins biographer. “The sector used to be speculated to be dangerous and adventurous,” and thus now not for women folk back then, Lewis says.

A civil rights activist

With World War II over, Collins’ husband returned to medical school at Howard University. She found an instructor job there in 1947 and joined him. To complete her Ph.D., she would now should squeeze in far off work and some summers in Chicago. Though her marriage dissolved in 1949, she also finished her Ph.D. that year.

Her new degree won her a promotion to assistant professor at Howard, but she wasn’t hopeful for future prospects. “They refused to promote me because they said I used to be too young. However it used to be also because I used to be a girl,” she later told Warren. Also Collins chafed on the department’s majority deal with medically useful research.

In 1951, Collins accepted a teaching position at what used to be Florida A&M University, like Howard, one within the entire us of a’s historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. “The white institutions wouldn’t hire her, so she went back to the HBCUs,” Lewis says. This put her in Tallahassee as civil rights issues were intensifying. Also in 1951, she remarried, taking the name Margaret S. Collins which may possibly be on publications for the remainder of her life.

In Florida she may perchance run her own field expeditions seeking out termites with help from her husband, Herbert L. Collins. By 1958, she had collected and tested termites’ ability for what she typically is termed “water family members” in nine of the 13 termite species known in Florida, including those from the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Over years, Collins explored how some termite species — without the extra-hardened outer armor of ants or beetles — steer clear of drying to a crisp in a desolate tract while others need steaming rainforests. Evolutionary biologist Barbara Thorne of the University of Maryland in College Park points to the long string of papers on water family members as a highlight of Collins’ research.

In the tip, there may possibly be research trips that included Herbert Jr. and then his younger brother James as field assistants. Collecting termites is a lively business, and a giant machete used to be a portion of their mom’s field gear. “That’s a famous machete,” Lewis says. Herbert Jr. saved it.

But life used to be now not easy. Moving to Tallahassee within the Fifties era of activism exposed the Collins family to toxic racism. Herbert Jr. remembers his mother planning to give a science talk on termites at a historically white school, Florida State University. But a phone caller threatened to explode the science building if a Black speaker dared to lecture there. In step with Warren, Collins then searched the building herself and located no bomb. She also found one more location for the debate.

For the duration of the Tallahassee bus boycott, Collins ended up doing one special hour of darkness drive that “terrified” her, Warren reports. The civil rights group that had typically is termed for the boycott got a tip that the police and FBI were about to raid its headquarters. Collins spirited away the membership records with names, addresses and activities.

The family farmhouse also came less than threat from violent racists. Because the story goes, Collins, despite her other responsibilities, spent nights on the porch with a shotgun. She guarded the home, Herbert Jr. confirms, but now not by myself.

“We had a rocker and a sofa on the market, and when the threats were high, we would sleep on the market,” Herbert Jr. remembers. Each parent had a gun. “For just a bit kid, it used to be kind of exciting,” he says. The family told jokes, talked about “little things,” no lower than until the children fell asleep. The hazards of the time were real, but handiest the mailbox got damaged.

Margaret and Herbert Collins divorced in 1963. She left Florida A&M to come back to Howard University in 1964 as a full professor. She juggled the wishes of her students, her science and her sons while working at Howard and at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia) to boot as traveling for research.

The question of how termites got by with little or no water, including within the Sonoran Barren region, continued to intrigue her. She worked through species after species. Overall, water, scarce or abundant, and heat are the 2 main factors shaping where particular termites reside, Collins wrote in her chapter within the 1969 two-volume, multi-author opus Biology of Termites.

An brisk seeker of grants and collaborations, she traveled within america, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South The the u.s. of a to probe for termites. From the late Seventies, she held (volunteer) research associate status on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and worked on its termite collection, which now contains a couple of dozen of her own specimens.

“In a number of ways, she used to be just an enthusiastic person,” says Thorne, who used to be a co-adventurer and coauthor with Collins. “The museum stuff, the lectures, the teaching, whatever — she loved all that. But she used to be at her best within the field.”

Margaret Collins, the ‘termite lady’

A collection of the termite marvels that lured Collins into the tropics used to be that glue-blasting “less-floppy elephant nose” (as Ware described it). This defense mechanism looked as if it would have evolved twice. Soldiers belonging to species of Nasutitermes and Subulitermes can do it, yet those species sprouted from rather different branches of the termites’ evolutionary tree. “Parallel evolution” is what Emerson and other scientists had typically is termed the phenomenon of now not-so-related look-alikes.

Collins worked with biochemist Glenn Prestwich to impeach the notion. Delving into the unusual compounds within the glue convinced them that the cocktails are both so odd and similar that it’s too improbable they arose independently. “We were surprised,” Prestwich and Collins reported in 1981 in Biochemical Systematics and Ecology.

The correct sense of what Collins faced as she did all this termite exploring may come from her own words on a pdf of three aged, typewritten pages she had sent colleagues a few mishap in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest. Titled “Me and My Maggot or My Duel with Dermatobia hominis,” the account features a parasitic fly larva that burrows into living flesh and grows spines.

“The final sorry episode” as Collins puts it, starts one August day as she’s sitting outside a small motel in Colombia that served as headquarters for sampling Amazon insect life. A “sharp-stinging sensation” in her ankle prompts “a sense of foreboding.” Sure enough, in coming days, the spot swells into a stabbing-painful, oozing “volcano shaped” lump.

When Collins gets home to america, she tries a couple of home remedies, some a chunk helpful. She’s slammed by work: a U.S. collecting time out, a commitment on a research project, plus she’s “deeply eager about catching up on school responsibilities.” Then while teaching, she’s hit by “pains so severe as to render speech not you possibly can and decorum doubtful.”

She excuses herself from “a polite but wondering class” to seek for an ice p.c.. The closest options are cans of frozen orange juice listen, which no lower than let her set up a movie to expose her class while she waits for the tip. After phoning experts and checking her parasitology references, she goes to an emergency room. A health care provider cuts into the inflamed tissue and finds — nothing.

In the tip Collins solved the matter herself. She coated the realm with thick ointment, and the larva wriggled up to the skin surface. Nabbing it with forceps didn’t work, so “I squeezed and squeezed and SQUEEZED until out it popped!” she wrote. She then preserved the larva as a scientific specimen.

Fieldwork is a combination of wonder and alarm in Ware’s stories to boot. On a contemporary expedition in Guyana, Ware and her students got a sturdy reminder of the need for vigilance: a giant caiman swimming fast upstream. In every other instance, students collecting insects at night heard a jaguarish growl off within the dark. Still dengue-carrying mosquitoes, no bigger than dandelion fluff, may perchance have been the scariest.

Ware never met Collins, who passed away in 1996 on a research time out to the Cayman Islands. The last time Herbert Jr. saw her alive used to be at an airport near Washington, D.C., where she’d collected an insect she found interesting in an airport females’ room.

Collins’ breakthrough into the largely male club of field biologists, her overpacked years as a single parent, along along with her competition for funds amid entrenched sexism and overt racism, make the “termite lady,” as she came to be typically is termed, an inspiring figure today. Her portrait hangs in Ware’s place of business.