Robert Walter Campbell Shelford

Robert Walter Campbell Shelford

Robert Walter Campbell Shelford (born August 3, 1872 in Singapore , † June 22, 1912 in Margate ) was a British entomologist , museum director and naturalist specializing in entomology and mimicry in insects; he specialized in Blattidae , a family within the cockroach, and did fundamental work on stick insects .

biography

Robert Walter Campbell Shelford was born on August 3, 1872 in Singapore to a prominent British businessman. After an accident at the age of three, he developed a hip joint damage that handicapped him for years. Most of the time he had to lie down. His mobility improved after an operation at the age of ten, but he found it impossible to take part in sports as a child; It was not until he was a student at Oxford that he found pleasure in golf. The tuberculosis responsible for the joint damage broke out again in his later life and probably caused his death much too early.

At the age of 13 his mobility was restored enough that he could be taught by a tutor.

Shelford studied at King's College London and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge . After graduating from Cambridge, he went in 1895 as assistant to Professor LC Miall for the subject of biology at Yorkshire College in Leeds. In 1897 he followed a call to Sarawak as curator of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching , where he spent the next seven years. During this time he sent a large number of collectibles to his old Cambridge university.

In 1902 he published a highly regarded monograph in the journal Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London on mimicry in insects in Borneo.

He left the Sarawak Museum in 1905 and returned to England. In Oxford , he became Associate Curator of the Hope Department of Zoology at the Oxford University Museum . From his trip home from Borneo back to England he also brought back a number of collectibles which he bequeathed to the Hope Collection in Oxford, in addition to an “immense collection of insects from Borneo which he held for the Hope Collection between 1899 and 1901 during his time as a curator of the Sarawak Museum ”(Smith, 1986: 58).

His main occupation at Oxford was cockroaches , but his work included other insects he had brought with him from Borneo as well as research in the library. Most of his published research on phasmids comes from his time in Oxford .

On June 25, 1908, he married Audrey Gurney of Bath . In April 1909 he slipped and his tuberculous bone disease flared up again. For the last three years of his life it greatly hindered his work. Robert Shelford died in Margate at the age of only 39 on June 22, 1912.

Species named after Shelford

Various orthopteroid insects were named after Shelford. These include a mantis from Borneo: Deroplatys shelfordi (Kirby, 1903), a Borneo phasmid : Baculofractum shelfordi (Bragg, 2005), two genera of cockroaches : Shelfordella (Adelung, 1910) and Shelfordina (Hebard, 1929), as well as 17 types of cockroaches .

The plants named after him include the Dischidia shelfordii pears.

Shelford's cockroaches

Shelford described 44 new genera of cockroaches and 326 new species.

Shelford's Orthoptera

Shelford only described a subspecies of the Orthoptera , the Gryllacris vicinissima nigratae (Shelford, 1902).

Shelford's phasmids

The vast majority of the phasmids in the Sarawak Museum in Kuching were collected during Shelford's time as curator of the museum, and this is likely to be the case for the majority of the insect groups in the collection. Many of the Borneo exhibits in the collections of the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge also date from Shelford's time in Sarawak.

In 1901 Shelford described the eggs of some phasmids, which he called " Necroscia , Marmessoidea and Agondasoidea ". He noted that "Phasmidae, despite their wonderful protective resemblance to sticks and leaves, are the Trogonae 's food source ".

In 1908 Shelford brought out a catalog of the phasmid species of Central America. This was based on the publications by Brunner (1907) & Redtenbacher (1906 & 1908), but contained some species that the other authors had not considered.

Illustration from Shelford's 1913 publication

Based on his work at Oxford, Shelford only described five new species of phasmids. All were from South America and the descriptions were published shortly after his death in 1913. These were the following types:

• Autolyca affinis (Shelford, 1913: 61, pl. 3.7 & 3.8.)
• Autolyca riveti (Shelford, 1913: 60, pl. 3.6.)
• Libethra intermedia (Shelford, 1913: 61.)
• Ocnophila nana (Shelford, 1913: 61.)
• Ocnophila riveti (Shelford, 1913: 62.)

In his work A Naturalist in Borneo , Shelford lists some references to phasmids (pp. 147–155, 215 and 315). Shelford's observations on insects from Borneo he carried out on both wild and captive species. He commented on the behavior of various phasmids during the night and referred to his observations on "some (phasmids) that I kept in captivity".

He then goes on to say that "most of the winged Phasmidae, especially some with magnificently colored wings, are diurnal or are at least as eager to feed during the day as they are at night when in captivity." He makes some observations on the eggs of phasmids in Borneo and reveals that while he was writing his book in England he had a small colony of Indian stick insects "which have reproduced sexually for several generations ".

Works

Shelford's best-known work, his book A Naturalist in Borneo (Ger. "A natural scientist in Borneo"), appeared in 1916, a few years after his death. The completion was carried out by his Oxford colleague Professor Edward B. Poulton . The first edition of the book achieved a high level of popularity and was reissued as a paperback by Oxford University Press in 1985.

The Shelford biography published by Bragg is mainly concerned with his work on phasmids (stick insects). Further biographical details written by EB Poulton can be found in the introduction to the book A Naturalist in Borneo .

Web links

• National Herbarium of the Netherlands: Shelford, Robert Walter Campbell.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} R. WC Shelford: A Naturalist in Borneo T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., London 1916 ( archive.org ).
2. ↑ Shelford, Robert Walter . In: John Archibald Venn (Ed.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 2: From 1752 to 1900 , Volume 5 : Pace – Spyers . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1953, pp. 488 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
3. ^ AZ Smith: A History of the Hope Entomological Collections in the University Museum, Oxford with lists of Archives and Collections. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1986.
4. ↑ Note: The term orthoperoid denotes insects that originally belonged to the order (biology) of the Orthoptera according to the scheme of Carl Linnaeus . As more and more new species were discovered, this original grouping had to be split up.
5. ^ R. Shelford: Notes on some Bornean Insects. In: Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 1901, pp. 689-690.
6. ^ R. Shelford: Family Phasmidae. In: Biologia Centrali-Americana, Orthoptera. Volume 2. 1908 [The Phasmidae: pp. 343-377, plates 5-8.]
7. ↑ K. Brunner von Wattenwyl: The insect family of the phasmids. Volume 2. Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1907.
8. ↑ J. Redtenbacher: The insect family of the phasmids. Volume 1. Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1906.
9. ↑ J. Redtenbacher: The insect family of the phasmids. Volume 3. Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1908.
10. ↑ R. Shelford: Orthoptères. Blattides, Mantides, and Phasmides. In: Mission du Service Géographique de L'Armée pour la Mesure d'un Arc de Méridien Equatorial en Amérique du Sud sous le contrôle scientifique de L'Académie des Sciences, 1899-1906. Volume 10, No. 1, 1913, pp. 57-62 and Plate 3 ( biodiversitylibrary.org ).
11. ^ PE Bragg: Biographies of Phasmatologists - 8. Robert Walter Campbell Shelford. In: Phasmid Studies. 17, No. 1, 2008, pp. 8-10 ( biodiversitylibrary.org ).