Entomologists of the past

I signed up a few months ago to write short biographies about Entomological Society of America fellows (can you tell I'm just getting around to them?). As a resident of Ohio, I am a member of the North Central Branch, but I also joined the Eastern Branch so I could attend their conference when I was considering going to the University of Maryland. So, now that I'm in the system that way I was assigned two fellows to write about.

This has actually been a cool experience researching both because of how different their careers were. My first biography is about Donald Borror from Ohio State. For those of you not familiar with the big names of entomology, Borror is definitely up there. He helped write and edit many of the widely used textbooks and field guides, such as An Introduction to the Study of Insects and A Field Guide to Insects: America North of Mexico. He also was an avid ornithologist, and studied the bioacoustics of both birds and insects. The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at OSU contains one of the largest collections of animal recorded sounds. He died in 1988, and many mourning colleagues wrote memorials. As you can expect, putting together his short biography is quite easy with the information I can find online and exploring the Borror lab.

Donald Borror

The other ESA fellow I am writing about, Fred P. Ide, is comparably a little guy in the Ent world. Like Borror, he continued to research and teach at his alma mater, the University of Toronto. Ide was an expert mayfly taxonomist and aquatic biologist and did a lot of research throughout his years on streams, weather, and the effects of DDT. But I have had to dig really deep to piece together this man's life. The fellow biography is to follow a template, so I need the basic information on birth, death, graduation years, career moves, and society memberships and service. There is no other biography on Ide's life, and his death notice in the The Bulletin of the Entomological Society of Canada was very short, the only new piece of information being the date of his passing. I could only find his birth date listed on an ancestry site, and still don't know the exact year he entered the University of Toronto. However, going through old journals and their occasional directly has helped. I now know who he worked with for the Canadian National Collection before attending Toronto, and a few societies he joined. But that took a lot of work going through old, scanned articles (also I want to include a shout out to anyone who is scanning old articles for online use - thank you!!)

An ironic twist is that Ide was an undergrad with a famous fisheries scientist, William Ricker, who had put together his own very detailed autobiography. I've gotten a lot of information mostly from Ricker's personal accounts, and even a picture.

Frederick Ide (from W.E. Ricker, 2006. Environmental Biology of Fishes 75: 7-37)

Of course, I could probably contact his old department (which has since split), and will once I figure out what is still missing. But what's been so interesting has been reading his work and thinking about how most entomologists will have a career such as his: doing careful, meticulous work, attending many conferences, adding to the scientific process, and having no long biography written about their work. Most of us won't make it to the big leagues, but in my opinion that doesn't make our careers any less important.