On the drive to highschool, on the first signal of hassle, “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 quickly as younger Herbert had wriggled to a safer spot on the ground of the automotive, his mother would stomp the fuel pedal and hope to outrun the police as soon as once more.
Collins, on her morning drives to Herbert’s faculty after which on to her college school job, was giving rides to folks boycotting town’s racially segregated public buses. Tallahassee’s seven-month boycott isn’t as well-known because the one in Montgomery, Ala., which began in late 1955, however the Tallahassee boycott additionally stirred fierce white pushback. The authorized system made an instance of 21 different native activists providing rides, charging them with operating a worthwhile metropolis transportation system with out getting a franchise from town to take action. The focused activists have been every fined $500 and, if caught in criminal activity through the subsequent yr, would spend 60 days in jail.
Herbert nonetheless remembers crouching within the automotive, watching his mom’s foot on the fuel. “I used to be like, ‘You’re going to make a gap within the ground should you press it a lot more durable,’ ” he says. They by no means caught her although.
“I feel her life would make an ideal film,” says entomologist Jessica Ware of the American Museum of Pure Historical past in New York Metropolis.
In her science, Collins specialised in termites, finding out a few of the specimens that are actually beneath Ware’s care on the museum. Although these bugs are maybe greatest identified for the harm they will do to human-built constructions, Collins’ curiosity was not within the service of pest management. As an alternative, she studied the huge, odd universe of termite variety, glorying within the variations among the many world’s 2,000-plus species. Many of those species are usually not more likely than a human to eat soggy porch steps.
Although she began by finding out termite resistance to dehydration within the lab, Collins in time established herself as a talented subject biologist. She explored in at the least 10 international locations exterior the USA and was acknowledged as an authority on termites of the Caribbean. Each Collins and Ware, a technology aside, made expeditions into Guyana’s rainforests, wealthy in bugs of curiosity to science but in addition in snakes, prowling jaguars and different excitements. Discipline biology will not be for the faint-hearted.
Right now, Collins additionally will get acknowledged for overcoming the various frictions that got here with working within the largely white male world of U.S. midcentury biology. Her doctoral dissertation, accomplished in 1949, made Collins “solely the third Black lady zoologist within the nation,” at the least with a Ph.D., writes science historian Wini Warren in Black Ladies Scientists in the USA. And that might make Collins America’s first Black feminine entomologist to earn such a sophisticated diploma.
Captivated by termites
Collins’ childhood shared some particulars with the lifetime of mathematician Katherine Johnson (SN: 5/25/21), portrayed within the beloved 2016 e book and film Hidden Figures, about Black ladies at NASA who carried out key calculations for early area flight (SN: 12/23/16). Each Johnson and Margaret James Strickland Collins (her title reflecting two marriages) grew up in West Virginia. Each ladies skipped grades, went early to the identical highschool after which the identical school.
Born Margaret James in 1922 because the vigorous, precocious fourth of 5 kids, Collins grew up within the school city of Institute, W.Va., discovering loads of countryside to discover nature. Her superpower was not unique math however studying. She realized simply by sitting on the lap of whichever mum or dad did the nightly story time. At age 6, Collins was allowed to borrow any e book she may attain within the library of West Virginia State Faculty, a traditionally Black establishment.
Her father, Rollins James, taught agriculture there. He had labored with crop pioneer George Washington Carver and had a grasp’s diploma from Tuskegee Institute. Her mom, Luella, had wished to grow to be an archaeologist, Collins informed Warren throughout an interview. Luella was a passionate reader, “impartial,” even “rebellious,” Collins stated.
Collins may definitely query authority. Herbert, the son who crouched on the automotive ground, remembers her saying about childhood Christmas merriment: “My mother and father really tried to make me suppose {that a} reindeer may fly by way of the air.” Having seen an image of a reindeer, “I knew there’s simply no approach this reindeer may fly.”
Each math prodigy Johnson, born in 1918, and reindeer-skeptic Collins went to West Virginia State Faculty, now West Virginia State College.
Collins had deliberate to main in biology, however classes she described to Warren as “stereotyped, uninteresting and malodorous” and a “gruff and horrifying” trainer sapped her curiosity. She misplaced her scholarship. Nonetheless, summers working saved her in school lengthy sufficient to come across a biology professor who helped her ID a water creature she’d found in a stream, thereby renewing her curiosity. Then got here World Conflict II.
These have been unsure instances. In July 1942, she married Bernard Strickland, a premed scholar at Howard College in Washington, D.C. Inside months, although, he was drafted for army service.
After ending her undergraduate diploma the following yr, with a serious in biology and minors in physics and German, she headed to the College of Chicago. Although the state of West Virginia had a publicly sponsored graduate faculty, it had solely began admitting Black college students in 1940 (with the whopping complete of three, together with Katherine Johnson).
Collins obtained a $125 stipend from the state, she later informed biographer Warren, nevertheless it wouldn’t go very far. To assist fund grad faculty, she labored an evening shift at a ball bearing manufacturing facility. After lease and different bills, she may afford solely 10 meals every week — and she or he was typically exhausted.
Nevertheless it was there that her life took on a brand new path. In an opportunity dialog at class registration, she met American biologist and termite maestro Alfred Emerson. Emerson was “a real big in termite analysis,” says Nan-Yao Su, a specialist in termites and one among Collins’ later collaborators, now on the College of Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Analysis and Schooling Middle.
Collins was captivated by the course she took with Emerson. He heard of her monetary pinch and supplied an assistantship that included taking care of the termite assortment. This started her lifelong fascination.
Termites rank amongst nature’s star soil engineers in lots of tropical and subtropical ecosystems. Plus, like bees and ants, they will create complicated societies with specialised castes and, in some species, bizarre physique elements. Among the many Nasutitermes species Collins studied, some termite troopers defend themselves by squirting sticky glop from their heads by way of a glue gun construction “like a less-floppy elephant nostril,” Ware says.
Collins’ Ph.D. thesis become her first publication on termite tolerance for water loss, which appeared in 1950 in Ecology. Of three species collected within the Chicago space, she discovered that the one which additionally ranged broadly throughout the extra arid West may survive longer in drier air. The thickness of a waxy outer layer performed a job however didn’t clarify all of the variations within the species’ ranges.
This was one small bit of knowledge for what are big questions on biodiversity. How can kin ultimately grow to be so various? And the way does evolution create the wild patchwork of species overlaying the planet? With so many varieties all over the world, termites are nice for exploring these questions.
Although Emerson supported her Ph.D. work, he had his prejudices too. He refused to let Collins be part of an expedition documenting vegetation and animals within the Pacific’s Marshall Islands after the battle. His objections have been simply “good ole boy stuff,” sniffs Vernard Lewis, a termite entomologist on the College of California, Berkeley and a Collins biographer. “The sphere was alleged to be harmful and adventurous,” and thus not for girls again then, Lewis says.
A civil rights activist
With World Conflict II over, Collins’ husband returned to medical faculty at Howard College. She discovered an teacher job there in 1947 and joined him. To complete her Ph.D., she would now should squeeze in distant work and a few summers in Chicago. Although her marriage dissolved in 1949, she additionally completed her Ph.D. that yr.
Her new diploma gained her a promotion to assistant professor at Howard, however she wasn’t longing for future prospects. “They refused to advertise me as a result of they stated I used to be too younger. Nevertheless it was additionally as a result of I used to be a girl,” she later informed Warren. Additionally Collins chafed on the division’s majority give attention to medically helpful analysis.
In 1951, Collins accepted a instructing place at what grew to become Florida A&M College, like Howard, one of many nation’s traditionally Black faculties and universities, or HBCUs. “The white establishments wouldn’t rent her, so she went again to the HBCUs,” Lewis says. This put her in Tallahassee as civil rights points have been intensifying. Additionally in 1951, she remarried, taking the title Margaret S. Collins that might be on publications for the remainder of her life.
In Florida she may run her personal subject expeditions searching for termites with assist from her husband, Herbert L. Collins. By 1958, she had collected and examined termites’ skill for what she known as “water relations” in 9 of the 13 termite species identified in Florida, together with these from the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Over years, Collins explored how some termite species — with out the extra-hardened outer armor of ants or beetles — keep away from drying to a crisp in a desert whereas others want steaming rainforests. Evolutionary biologist Barbara Thorne of the College of Maryland in Faculty Park factors to the lengthy string of papers on water relations as a spotlight of Collins’ analysis.
Ultimately, there could be analysis journeys that included Herbert Jr. after which his youthful brother James as subject assistants. Accumulating termites is a vigorous enterprise, and an enormous machete was a part of their mother’s subject gear. “That’s a well-known machete,” Lewis says. Herbert Jr. saved it.
However life was not straightforward. Shifting to Tallahassee within the Nineteen Fifties period of activism uncovered the Collins household to poisonous racism. Herbert Jr. remembers his mom planning to provide a science discuss on termites at a historically white faculty, Florida State College. However a cellphone caller threatened to explode the science constructing if a Black speaker dared to lecture there. In response to Warren, Collins then searched the constructing herself and located no bomb. She additionally discovered another location for the discuss.
Throughout the Tallahassee bus boycott, Collins ended up doing one particular midnight drive that “terrified” her, Warren reviews. The civil rights group that had known as for the boycott obtained a tip that the police and FBI have been about to raid its headquarters. Collins spirited away the membership data with names, addresses and actions.
The household farmhouse additionally got here beneath risk from violent racists. Because the story goes, Collins, regardless of her different duties, spent nights on the porch with a shotgun. She guarded the home, Herbert Jr. confirms, however not alone.
“We had a rocker and a settee on the market, and when the threats have been excessive, we might sleep on the market,” Herbert Jr. remembers. Every mum or dad had a gun. “For a bit of child, it was type of thrilling,” he says. The household informed jokes, talked about “little issues,” at the least till the youngsters fell asleep. The risks of the time have been actual, however solely the mailbox obtained broken.
Margaret and Herbert Collins divorced in 1963. She left Florida A&M to return to Howard College in 1964 as a full professor. She juggled the wants of her college students, her science and her sons whereas working at Howard and at Federal Metropolis Faculty (now the College of the District of Columbia) in addition to touring for analysis.
The query of how termites obtained by with little or no water, together with within the Sonoran Desert, continued to intrigue her. She labored by way of species after species. Total, water, scarce or plentiful, and warmth are the 2 principal elements shaping the place explicit termites stay, Collins wrote in her chapter within the 1969 two-volume, multi-author opus Biology of Termites.
An lively seeker of grants and collaborations, she traveled in the USA, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America to probe for termites. From the late Seventies, she held (volunteer) analysis affiliate standing on the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past and labored on its termite assortment, which now consists of a number of dozen of her personal specimens.
“In some ways, she was simply an enthusiastic individual,” says Thorne, who was a co-adventurer and coauthor with Collins. “The museum stuff, the lectures, the instructing, no matter — she beloved all that. However she was at her greatest within the subject.”
Margaret Collins, the ‘termite girl’
Among the many termite marvels that lured Collins into the tropics was that glue-blasting “less-floppy elephant nostril” (as Ware described it). This protection mechanism appeared to have developed twice. Troopers belonging to species of Nasutitermes and Subulitermes can do it, but these species sprouted from relatively totally different branches of the termites’ evolutionary tree. “Parallel evolution” is what Emerson and different scientists had known as the phenomenon of not-so-related look-alikes.
Collins labored with biochemist Glenn Prestwich to query the notion. Delving into the weird compounds within the glue satisfied them that the cocktails are each so odd and comparable that it’s too inconceivable they arose independently. “We have been stunned,” Prestwich and Collins reported in 1981 in Biochemical Systematics and Ecology.
The most effective sense of what Collins confronted as she did all this termite exploring might come from her personal phrases on a pdf of three aged, typewritten pages she had despatched colleagues a few mishap in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest. Titled “Me and My Maggot or My Duel with Dermatobia hominis,” the account incorporates a parasitic fly larva that burrows into dwelling flesh and grows spines.
“The entire sorry episode” as Collins places it, begins one August day as she’s sitting exterior 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.” Positive sufficient, in coming days, the spot swells right into a stabbing-painful, oozing “volcano formed” lump.
When Collins will get dwelling to the USA, she tries a number of dwelling treatments, some a bit useful. She’s slammed by work: a U.S. amassing journey, a dedication on a analysis undertaking, plus she’s “deeply concerned in catching up on faculty duties.” Then whereas instructing, she’s hit by “pains so extreme as to render speech not possible and decorum uncertain.”
She excuses herself from “a well mannered however questioning class” to seek for an ice pack. The closest choices are cans of frozen orange juice focus, which at the least let her arrange a film to indicate her class whereas she waits for the top. After phoning consultants and checking her parasitology references, she goes to an emergency room. A health care provider cuts into the infected tissue and finds — nothing.
In the long run Collins solved the issue herself. She coated the realm with thick ointment, and the larva wriggled as much as the pores and skin floor. Nabbing it with forceps didn’t work, so “I squeezed and squeezed and SQUEEZED till out it popped!” she wrote. She then preserved the larva as a scientific specimen.
Fieldwork is a mixture of marvel and alarm in Ware’s tales as nicely. On a current expedition in Guyana, Ware and her college students obtained a robust reminder of the necessity for vigilance: an enormous caiman swimming quick upstream. In one other occasion, college students amassing bugs at evening heard a jaguarish growl off at nighttime. Nonetheless dengue-carrying mosquitoes, no greater than dandelion fluff, may need been the scariest.
Ware by no means met Collins, who handed away in 1996 on a analysis journey to the Cayman Islands. The final time Herbert Jr. noticed her alive was at an airport close to Washington, D.C., the place she’d collected an insect she discovered fascinating in an airport women’ room.
Collins’ breakthrough into the largely male membership of subject biologists, her overpacked years as a single mum or dad, alongside together with her competitors for funds amid entrenched sexism and overt racism, make the “termite girl,” as she got here to be known as, an inspiring determine in the present day. Her portrait hangs in Ware’s workplace.
