Name Margaret Collins | ||
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Margaret James Strickland Collins (September 4,1922 – April 27, 1996) was an African-American zoologist, specializing in the study of termites. Collins was responsible, together with her colleague David Nickle, for identifying a new species, the Neotermes luykxi (the Florida dampwood termite).
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Life and work
Collins was born in 1922 in Institute, West Virginia. She started college at age fourteen and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from West Virginia State University in 1943. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1950, becoming only the third Black woman zoologist in the country. Her PhD work focused on zoology and her mentor was Alfred E. Emerson. She taught at Florida A&M University and at Howard University.
Collins did extensive field work in North and South America, specializing in the insects of Guyana and Florida. From the late 1970s through 1996, Collins was a research associate in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Department of Entomology. Her primary area of study was termites of the Caribbean. Her life's research regarding termites included: the evolution of desiccation resistance in termites; various termite species' tolerance of high temperatures; defensive behavior in South American termites, including chemical defenses; termite ecology; species abundance in virgin and disturbed tropical rain forests; and behavioral ecology, taxonomy, and entomology.
Collins died April 27, 1996, during a research trip to the Cayman Islands.