Howard Ensign Evans
Howard Ensign Evans (born February 23, 1919 in Hartford , Connecticut , † July 18, 2002 ) was an American entomologist .
Life
Evans was the son of tobacco farmers and was interested in insects as a teenager. He studied English, then entomology at the University of Connecticut , worked at the Connecticut Agricultural Experimental Station and earned his master's degree from Cornell University in 1941 with a thesis on wasps . During World War II, he was a laboratory technician and parasitologist with the US Army in Newfoundland and North Carolina and discovered that a mysterious illness in Army personnel was caused by Giardia . After the war he received his PhD with a GI Bill from Cornell University on the taxonomy of the Pompilini tribe and became an assistant professor at Kansas State University , where he studied in particular taxonomy and behavior of sand wasps . He was long professor at Harvard University and the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and from 1973 at Colorado State University , where he saw better opportunities for field research.
He dealt mainly with wasps , their behavior and evolution and taxonomy of hymenoptera. He was a pioneer in the use of data on behavior in systematics and he showed how behavior influenced the evolutionary development of, for example, wasps. He first described 31 genera and 782 species of insects (until 1999).
He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1977 and received its Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal in 1976 . In 1967 he received the William J. Walker Prize from the Boston Museum of Science.
He was married to Mary Alice Evans (1921-2014), with whom he had three children and with whom he wrote several books.
His popular science book about insects Life on a little known planet has also been translated into German. His 1963 book Wasp farm was shaped by his experiences on his 8-acre farm in South Hill, Ithaca, New York , near Buttermilk Falls State Park . The book was nominated for the National Book Award. He also wrote on the history of entomology and the scientific exploration of the American West.
Mary Jane West-Eberhard is one of his students .
Evans also published poems (first The Song I Sing , Boston 1951).
Fonts
- with Mary Jane West-Eberhard: Wasps, University of Michigan Press 1970
- Wasp Farm: A Scientist's Vivid Account of the Remarkable Lives of Wasps, The Natural History Press, Doubleday 1963, reprinted at Cornell University Press 1985
- The comparative ethology and evolution of sand wasps, Harvard University Press 1966
- The behavioral patterns of solitary wasps, Annual Review of Entomology, Volume 11, 1966, pp. 123-154
- Insect Biology: A Textbook of Entomology, Addison-Wesley 1984
- The Pleasures of Entomology, Washington DC, Smithsonian Press 1985
- Life on a little known planet, New York: Dutton 1968, reprinted from The Lyons Press 1993
- German translation: The trillion people. The unknown world of insects, Lübbe 1969, as a paperback at Bastei-Lübbe 1980
- with Mary Alice Evans: William Morton Wheeler : Biologist, Harvard University Press 1970
- with Mary Alice Evans: Australia: a Natural History, Smithsonian Press 1983
- with Mary Alice Evans: Cache La Poudre: the Natural History of a River, University Press of Colorado 1993
- Pioneer Naturalists: The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals, Henry Holt 1993
- A Naturalist's Years in the Rocky Mountains, 2001
- The Natural History of the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1819-1820), Oxford University Press 1997
- The Man Who Loved Wasps: A Howard Ensign Evans Reader, Johnson Books 2004
- with Kevin M. O'Neill: The Sand Wasps: Natural History and Behavior, Harvard University Press 2007
- with Kevin M. O'Neill: The Natural History and Behavior of North American Beewolves, Cornell University Press 1988
Web links
References and comments
- ^ West-Eberhard, obituary in Biographical Memoirs Fellows National Academy 2005
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Evans, Howard Ensign |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American entomologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 23, 1919 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hartford , Connecticut |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 18, 2002 |