November 28, 2025 • 44 mins
Yves breaks down the history of Dr. Margaret S. Collins, the first professionally trained Black woman entomologist.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and Smantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to stuff I've never told you productive iHeartRadio,
and once again we are so happy to do another
female first, and that.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Means we are happy to welcome back Eves.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome Eve. Hey, Hey, I'm so happy to have you.
I didn't do my introduction like I normally do. I
was gonna say intrepid international Eaves. I had already planned it.
I appreciate that. Well, thank you. But you have been
(00:47):
doing a lot of traveling. What's been going on with you?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Eves? Yeah? I just.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Twenty four hours ago, maybe somewhere between twenty four hours
and forty eight hours ago go I left New Delhi, India,
and now I am in Cape Town, South Africa. And honestly,
you know, I was thinking that I haven't gotten the
chance to mourn leaving India, because I haven't gotten a
(01:16):
chance to feel sad about not being in India anymore,
because truly I loved India. I'm not good at picking favorites.
I don't really care to pick favorites because I like
different things for different reasons and it's just really hard
for me to make those decisions. But I do like
India's really up there. For me, like, I had a
great experience there because I felt like, I feel like
I got to experience so many different parts of the spectrum,
(01:41):
and I got to experience it with people who lived
in the places that I was in, which was in
Utra Khand, which is in the northeast. It's a state
in the northeast. I was very near the Himalayas. And
I also got to experience New Delhi, which is a huge, huge, huge,
huge city. Twenty something million people there, I believe, or
like thirty million people something like that. And I got
(02:06):
to meet people who lived in those that place too,
and people who were there from other parts of Indian
than people who were there from outside of India who
had you know, Indian ethnic origins. So I like, I
feel like I got to experience a huge breath of it.
And I was fed a lot of food, and I
learned a lot about hospitality in cooking and sharing meals
(02:31):
and like serving during my time there, because there was
a period when I was at a religious spiritual philosophical
retreat basically, and I was fed three meals a day,
and I was that food was prepared by some of
the other people who were there, and I shared these
(02:52):
meals with the other the nuns basically who lived there.
And there is a lot, there's so much. Anytime I
go somewhere, I learned I take something about hospitality with me,
like the way people treat their guests, the way they
serve them. And I mean, I couldn't do anything on
(03:17):
my own. The moment I started sniffling, I like, all
of the remedies were suggested to me, given to me.
I was given this thing of clothes. Put these clothes
in your mouth, hold it here. I was given more milk,
don't come, don't wake up this early, don't worry about
doing this. Do you want this? Do you need this?
Are you okay? Given this arivedic remedy I was giving?
(03:41):
Do you want these pills? I was like, oh my,
do you know the feeling of being overwhelmed with care?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
It's like it's a great feeling because it makes you feel.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So special and important. And then it's also like, oh
my God, like, am I like this to people?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Can I be like this to you know? Am I
this helpful? I want to be like that?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Because you know, I was talking to them about it,
and they were saying one of the other people who
was there, who was Indian, was like, yeah, like I
do this and my child is like, they hate, they
hate how She was like, I'm sorry for how you
know how how much we were trying to take care
of you, but it's just like how how I do things,
how we do things. She was like, my child doesn't
(04:24):
like it at all, That's what she said. She's like,
my child doesn't love it. So you know, I had
a great experience in all ways. And I got the nice, chill,
tranquil side of meditating and looking at the mountains, and
(04:45):
I got the other side being in the hectic chaos
of New Delhi traffic with getting into accidents and nobody
saying anything.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It's like just another day, didn't matter.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
It's all yellow to each other and move on.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Even if that like one of our drivers just like
barely glanced in the rear view mirror and didn't say
anything at all.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
This is just normal. So yeah, loved it, honestly loved it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, that's great, and I do really relate to the
I experienced that a lot when I leave a place
and you're just so sad to have left it because
it was so beautiful. And you know, there was so
much more to see and do, so I get mourning
a place. And I also when I was in China,
I had a I wasn't good with chopsticks in the beginning.
(05:39):
I'm great with them now listeners, but in the beginning,
and people.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Were concerned for me that I wouldn't eat enough.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So this older Chinese woman took me to a bakery,
an American style bakery, and was like, you need cake.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
It was so sweet.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
It was like such a such a funny she can't
use chip, Let's get her American cake, Like thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It is nice to see that kind of hospitality and
people wanting to take care of you.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
But yeah, we're so.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Glad you could make this workout as you all through
all your travels. And I am extremely excited about who
we're talking about today because we have said before we've
shared our thoughts on bugs, and I mentioned that maybe
we should have somebody and I would like to talk
about some insects some more. And here we go.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So who are we talking about today? Eves?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Today we're talking about doctor Margaret S. Collins and the
insect that we were talking about today that she largely
focused on was one you might not expect.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'll save it for later.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You'll get the nice surprise of which bug it is
that she focused on.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
But yes, I had that in mind.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
How we previously talked about how it would be cool
to talk about an entomologist, and I had never thought
about bringing one onto the show, So I appreciate that
you gave that suggestion. So, doctor Margaret S. Collins was
the first black American woman to be awarded a PhD
that involved entomology at a major university. She was the
first entomologist at Florida A and M University, and she
(07:27):
was the third Black American woman zoologist. But she herself
described herself as an ecologist, and her story is really fascinating.
And I really liked the way that she arrived at
her work in the field.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
So excited to talk about it. Who I am too?
So shall I get into the history? Yes? Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
So she was born Margaret James in Institute, West Virginia,
on September fourth, nineteen twenty two, and her parents were
Luella and Rollins James, and she was the fourth of
five children. Her dad got his bachelor's and master's degree
from West Virginia State College and Tuskegee Institute, and he
worked at Tuskegee for a period, then he went to
(08:23):
teach vocational agriculture at West Virginia State. And Luella, Margaret's mother,
she wanted to become an archaeologist, but there weren't a
ton of opportunities for education, and she went to West
Virginia State but she didn't finish to get her degree.
But Luella was a big reader. And here's a quote
(08:44):
from Margaret. She said, quote, My parents collected an impressive
library for their income level, and a regular feature of
the evenings would be one member reading aloud to the
rest of the family, with the youngest on the lap
of the reader. In my case, I learned to read
by following the of the reader.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Just the end of the quote.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
When Margaret was six years old, she was allowed to
check out books from the West Virginia State College library.
And according to Margaret, she grew up in the woods
in the barn. Two of her favorite books in her
childhood were Two Little Savages and Rolf in the Woods
by Ernest Thompson CN. And she would go outside and
(09:23):
collect interesting critters, what she called interesting critters, and when
she started bringing home these creatures, her dad would encourage
her to identify them in his books. And here's another
quote from Margaret. I had access to an array of
books on natural history, including the massive volumes of the
Nature Library. My favorite books in the series were Rogers
(09:46):
The Shell Book, dip Mars The Reptile Book, and Jordan
and Everman's The Fish Book, each of which contained English
technical terms as well as Latin names. She also learned
from her neighbors. There was a doctor named doctor Sinclair
who let her come to his house and read as
(10:07):
much as she wanted to, and his mother was previously enslaved,
and she talked to Margaret about things like making soap
and how to use medicinal plants. Margaret also spent time
with John Matthews, who was a scholar of patient and
African literature, and Margaret later talked about the importance of
her experience with books and how much she read them
(10:29):
when she was young. Early on, she said this, I
suspect that plenty of books in early unrestricted reading were
quite important. Hearing about scientists doing adventurous things and reading
the works of naturalists William Beebe were probably important. Perhaps
the biggest influence of all was contact with individuals who
found the discipline of biology fulfilling. Enthusiasm sometimes behaves like
(10:53):
an infectious agent. So I really loved this part of
her story of how her outside time is interacting with
her reading selfishly because of my own personal interests, like
I love outdoors things, I also love books, and both
(11:16):
of those things were very formative in my childhood. And
I think it's really cool that she had access to
those books like so at such a young age, and
that her parents encouraged her to do it, because I
could see one seeing these things in a book but
being totally out of touch with how that showed up
in the real world, or like going outside and playing
(11:38):
with things but not necessarily knowing how they worked, not
knowing about ecology, you know, not knowing about environments or ecosystems,
and things like this, like the reality of things not
touching the academics of things. And it seems like, very
early on, even if it wasn't in a super formalized way,
(12:00):
she was able to weave those two worlds together, and
so her world in books was very alive to her,
in her world in nature was very alive to her
as well. And I think that's cool because you know,
a lot of the time you can you can read
something in books, but then that can you can get
(12:21):
excited about it. Then when you're young, but then that
can that can fade away, like some of your interests
or enthusiasm, some of the excitement and fun around a
thing can really start to fade and dissipate.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And so I think these two things being weaved.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Together is a part of her story that I, you know,
can gather a lot of inspiration from and I'm happy
to learn about. So she did really well in school too,
and she ended up skipping two or three grades. So
I saw two grades in one place, but I also
saw that she skipped three grades. So she skipped like
(12:57):
two at first, and then later on she skipped another,
so that she was eleven years old in her freshman
class in high school. But the specifics, the particulars of
that aren't even really that important. The important part is
that she was pretty She did pretty well in school.
She was good at school, and some of the titles
you'll see in some of the articles about her, you'll
(13:17):
see child prodigy. So she was very good at school. However,
her social life wasn't the greatest. Of course, there was
a huge age difference between her and her classmates, but
she did say later on that she didn't necessarily regret
how her social life panned out at the time because
(13:40):
it reinforced her self sufficiency. I feel like this is
one of those sentiments that often comes in hindsight, because
it's like in the struggle, you don't necessarily think the
same way, and you know, your experience of having the
struggle when you're in the struggle is still very real.
Probably wasn't that great for her, as I would imagine,
(14:03):
but clearly she did feel like she gained some grit
through it. She ended up graduating from West Virginia State
College's Laboratory High School in nineteen thirty seven when she
was fourteen years old, and she enrolled at West Virginia
State College on an academic scholarship. So she didn't really
want to go to West Virginia State, but her family
(14:25):
was already paying for her older sister's education at Hampton Institute,
and they couldn't afford for her to go to another school.
So this is kind of like what I was talking about.
She said that at first, she lost interest in science
because she had a teacher who made it boring, and
that cost her the scholarship. I think that can happen
(14:46):
a lot as you get older, because I mean the
world becomes more jury in general, a lot more grey.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Tones on things as you start to get older.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So that can happen a lot, like a lot more
gray tones on things, and that cost her the scholarship.
So her parents started trying trying to help her pay
for her tuition during her second year, but they had
trouble paying for her tuition, so she started doing domestic
work over the summers to help pay for her own tuition.
(15:19):
So financially challenging, also academically challenging a difficult period for her,
but regardless, she did eventually find two mentors, Toy Davis
I think that's how you pronounce it, tye and Frederick Lanner.
So Davis was a black biologist with a PhD from Harvard,
(15:41):
and she had sent a sample of a colony of
marine animals to him for identification, and he had to
send it off to a lab. There was a waiting process,
and during that time he made sure that she had
a microscope that she could use and then he showed
her how to use a taxonomic key. And then he
also introduced her to a book that was pretty important
(16:04):
in bology called Freshwater Biology by Ward and Whipple. And he, however,
was soon drafted into World War two. And there was
another professor that Margaret had already been talking to who
had come over, and he was a professor of German.
He's a white professor named Frederick Lehner. He became her
(16:26):
mentor upon Davis's suggestion after Davis left. So Margaret majored
in bology with minors and physics and German. And she
ended up marrying Howard. University pre met student named Bernard E.
Strickland in July nineteen forty two, but he was also
(16:48):
soon drafted into the war. She graduated with her Bachelor
of Science in nineteen forty three. So I'm not so
much sure about their personal life, her life married to Bernard,
I don't really know much about their relationship, about how
they got along, but I do know that because he
(17:12):
was drafted, she didn't really spend a lot of personal
time with him, so he was pretty far away during
this time. And while she was studying either way, she
had planned to start a business collecting specimens for biological
supply houses. So she enrolled for a few classes at
(17:32):
the University of Chicago and her plan was just to
take enough courses in field zoology and ecology so she
could start her business. But as often happens, we plan
things with that isn't necessarily how they pan out, and
during registration her advisor had turned out to be the
zoologist Alfred Emerson, who was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
(17:56):
He drum Roe please was a termite expert, and he
managed the largest turmite collection and related looking.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Reprint library in the world.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Introduction of the insect of the hour termites. So, yes,
are you a fan of termites?
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Annie? Yeah, I just was not expect this was a twist.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I was like, oh, termites, I haven't given them much thought, luckily,
because it's never been a problem for me.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
And now I'm really curious.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
As a homeowner, I have good and much thought and
I'm like, but why.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, like why yeah, yeah? So you know I did
wonder this in learning about Margaret's story, not so sure
I even know now about what her draw to turmites was.
I know a little bit, as we'll learn about how
(18:59):
she got into studying termites, but I'm not fully sure
why she continued to learn about them. What was it
about the insects specifically that made her fall in love
with this specific topic. But she did start taking his
course and she became intoxicated by zoology. Even though she
was really interested in zoology, she still had trouble keeping
(19:23):
up with expenses. At the time, black people couldn't go
to the University of West Virginia, so the state would
offer one hundred and twenty five dollars per year towards
an out of state tuition, but that still wasn't enough
to cover the money that she needed. She ended up
getting a night job at a defense plant because she
was only eating about ten meals a week. But her
(19:46):
professors noticed her interest in the field of zoology, and
Emerson found out somehow that she was struggling financially, and
he offered her an assistantship and she was assigned to
look after the termite collection. So over the next years.
She's still an avid reader. She reads all the books
in Emerson's offers office library except for one that is
(20:08):
mentioned in the article I was reading about her, which
was like apparently very dull and boring. I can't remember
right now what the subject of that book was, but
I'm like, that's interesting. Out of how many books in
his library, she determined that this single was dull and boring,
because I'm sure a lot of them were also very
dense and academic, but she read a lot of them,
(20:32):
and even after all of that, she still hadn't chosen
her specialty. But then she found a book in his
library called Termite City, and it reminded her of the
books that she read in her childhood. So I love
that link back to her thinking of this as something
that has more like I guess, heart to it, Like
there's an emotional connection there that makes that reminds her
(20:55):
of why she's interested in why she loves it so much.
Is it's very heartwarming and wholesome to think about that connection.
But when her second year at the university was over
World War two and ended, her husband, Bernard came back
and he started going back to Howard for pre med.
(21:18):
So because Bernard came back, a few things changed.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
She gave up.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Doing full time classes at grad school. She ended up
getting a job as an instructor in the biology department
at Howard, and she wanted to make more money for
the family and to help support Bernard's studies, and she
also wanted to be with him because he had been
away for so long. So she spent the next three
summers in Chicago. She finished her coursework and did her research,
(21:50):
and Emerson was still a mentor to her, and he
was for decades. But when he was building a team
to go on an expedition the Marshall Islands, he did
not invite her and he said that he thought young
women should not go on expeditions, and he insisted that
(22:12):
Margaret take her finals and finish her thesis instead. But
their you know, professional relationship continued even after that, but
this was a point that he stood on. Margaret's thesis
was titled Differences in Toleration of drying among species of
termites reticular terms, and she this is her a seminal
(22:39):
work in her career. So doctor Margaret left her marriage
in nineteen forty nine. That year she got her PhD
in zoology from the University of Chicago, leading to her
first So there were other black American female zoologists before her,
(23:05):
but she was a pioneer in her field. Still during
the nineteen fifties, Emerson gave Margaret termite specimens he collected
on his research trips to Guyana, and this his research
in Guyana would really pan out to be something that
(23:26):
was important for doctor Margaret in her lifetime too. So
she was promoted from instructor to an assistant professor at Howard,
but Howard wasn't really quick to promote women to higher positions.
There were also problems that she herself had with Howard
at the time, like she didn't really care for the
(23:47):
president of Howard, who was Mordecai Johnson. She thought that
the zoology department was geared too much toward medical training.
There's a quote where she said it was a place
of entrenched chauvinism. She said that Mordecai Johnson didn't like
independence of thought, and when she was at Howard, she
(24:08):
said that he said he didn't want her to wear trousers.
But all of these reasons led her to quit at
Howard and in nineteen fifty one she became a professor
at Florida Agricultural Mechanical College, which is n HBCU, and
in nineteen fifty one she married Herbert L. Collins. Her
(24:31):
second marriage she had gotten divorced from Bernard, and so
she and Herbert had two sons, and she ended up
becoming the chair of Florida A and M's biology department
in nineteen fifty three. So that year she continued her
field studies. She began collecting specimens in the Everglades and
(24:52):
in Highlands State Park for a study of Florida termites.
And she would even take her family on collecting trips
where she was collecting sp vestments in the Everglades. So
this was her her career in zoology and ecology, but
she also did things outside of that. So there was
(25:15):
one time where she was invited to lecture on her
research at a university. It was a predominantly white university
and at the time the school got a bomb threat
and so her invitation was rescinded. Margaret was black, of course,
so it doesn't take much, you know, for violence to
(25:36):
be meeted upon you or threatened against you when you're
black at time like this. But she was also involved
in activism, So when Florida A and M called for
a bus boycott in Tallahassee, she offered to drive people
to work, and her involvement and her and that kind
of civil rights activism did lead to more surveillance by
state and local police as well as the FBI. And
(26:00):
there was a period between nineteen fifty two and nineteen
fifty seven where she didn't publish any scientific papers, although
she had been publishing I think like one or two
a year up until that time. It seems like her
civil rights efforts took priority. But in nineteen fifty eight
she did start publishing again. However, she had fallen behind
(26:23):
and keeping up with the science. So while she was
at Florida A and M. I believe, she wrote a
book and there was a quote where she talked about
how she had gotten sent back in illustration with the
when she was writing the book, and she didn't really
understand the illustration, and she realized that she had she
(26:44):
had fallen behind in her own personal work of keeping
up with the field, and so she wanted to stop working.
And she was like, if you don't let me go
and take some time off, then I'm just I'm just
going to leave. So I let her take time I'm
off And she got a National Science Foundation Summer Research
Fellowship to study new developments in genetics and in a
(27:07):
molecular biology at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Lab and
from sixty one nineteen sixty one. In nineteen sixty two,
she took her leave of absence from Florida A and M,
and she got another grant from the National Science Foundation.
She ended up studying for a year at the University
of Minnesota, where she was a research associate and at
(27:28):
the Minnesota Agricultural Experimental Station, and when she was there
she worked on studies of North American termites. While she
was in Minnesota, unfortunately, she was injured in a lab
accident and her lungs were permanently damaged from that, so
she divorced her second husband in nineteen sixty three. The
(27:50):
next year after that, she moved back to DC. She
became a full professor at Howard and she took a
tenured position at Federal City College, and she also became
a research associate at the Smithsonian. So a couple of
her students from Guyana encouraged her to reopen a field
(28:13):
station that Alfred Emerson had opened in Guyana and that
had been closed in the late nineteen fifties. But because
these students encouraged her, then doctor Margaret was.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Into the idea.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
So from nineteen seventy five, around nineteen seventy five nineteen
seventy six, she started getting in talks with the government
of Guyana, and in January of nineteen seventy eight she
got official government sponsorship in Guyana and from the Guyana
Department of the Army. She began rebuilding that field station
in Cartabo. With support from the government, travel grants from Howard,
(28:56):
and some funding from the Smithsonian, she was able to
move forward with the rebuilding of that station. She also
began researching defense mechanisms and termites, so basically the chemicals
that termites used to defend themselves from predators, and she
(29:19):
was studying and collecting in a lot of places. She
studying and collected termites in Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Surinam,
the Cayman Islands, Guatemala, Panama, and a lot of parts
of the United States. So she basically said that like,
(29:40):
termites are tropical, which I didn't know. She's like, yeah,
the termites in the United States are fine and everything,
but like the real ones are the ones elsewhere. So
she's had to study in a lot of different places
to do her collecting. She led conditions in the nineteen eighties,
(30:02):
and here's an excerpt from a letter that she wrote
to members of her group on one of the Earthwatch
expeditions that she went to in eighty three to eighty four.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
This is what she said.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
More than thirteen thousand insects specimens were taken, plus the
ectoparasite stuff. Samples of about a dozen identifiable medicinal plants,
along with photographs and data on their utilization were taken,
and the plants are now in the hands of specialists
at the US National Museum. So in the late seventies
(30:37):
to the nineties she researched termites and Guyana through the
Smithsonian's Department of Entomology, and throughout all her expeditions she
would inform Guyana's military ways to build that would avoid
termite damage and inform them of how to use termite
excretions to make stronger building materials. And the specimens that
(31:03):
she collected became part of the Collins Collection at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. So she retired from
Howard in nineteen eighty three. She ended up taking an
unpaid senior research position at the Smithsonian as well, But
during her trip to Guyana in eighty three to eighty four,
(31:24):
she had gotten d in gay fever and the issues
that she had resulting from that kept her out of
the field. During this time, she worked on updating and
preserving the Smithsonian's termite collection, and really she recognized how
important that work in the museum was, but she really
(31:45):
considered her herself like a field of colleges. She really
wanted to be back out in the field, and eventually
she did get back out into the field. In December
of nineteen ninety four, when she was seventy two years old,
she returned to Guyana with Matthew Kane, who was a
staff member at the Smithsonian who specialized in termite gut microbes,
(32:06):
and for a few weeks she collected specimens she needed
to describe a new termite species, and I think there
is a termite species that is named after her. So
she died in April nineteen ninety six when she was
doing field research in the Cayman Islands. And here's I'll
(32:27):
just read you a quote from there's a text called
Black Women's Scientists in the United States that has a
bio on her. And here's a quote from that bio.
Collins's research spanned five decades and encompassed nearly the entire
field of termite zoology, the evolution of desiccation resistance and termites,
various termite species, tolerance of high temperatures, defensive behavior in
(32:50):
South American termites including chemical defenses, termite ecology, species abundance
in virgin and disturbed tropical rainforest, and behavioral ecology, taxonomy
and entomology.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
End quote.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
And I just wanted to read that quote from that
bio because they encapsulated the breath for termite research a
lot better than I would have been able to, not
being a termite expert myself. But that just goes to
show you how wide ranging her research was in that
specific field and how much of an impact it did
(33:26):
have on later research and researchers that came after her.
She's remembered as a great world authority on the termite
diversity in the Caribbean and in Guyana. And that's the
story of doctor Margaret S.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Colin.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I love this. Okay, First of all, thank you, as always, Eves.
I'm so happy to learn about this. Second of all, listeners,
I'm really sorry we don't have videos sometimes because Samantha
and I were having very different reactions to the termite terms.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
I was very excited. Samantha was not excited at all.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
There's atentive disgust. I mean, come on, yeah, well, more confusion.
The confusion was more so more prominent than the disgust.
But because I'm like, really digest the systems of termites
and we're using this for buildings.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
What is happening? What is happening? How big are these termites?
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Oh, that's the other question, Like these are like the
swarms of what I think of, and like when they
built colonies. When we're talking about colonies, I'm like, yeah,
they've destroyed an entire building or forest, Like what what
are these things?
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (34:50):
In my mind, So also again a lot of confusion.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I just imagine that anything that I've seen, if it
also exists in the tropics, that it's astronomically larger. Like
I don't know, I just feel like everything there is
bigger because it has more more space to grow, it's
more undisturbed. So I just imagine anything that's here that
I know I'm small. If there's a species of spider
(35:16):
it was, there's like three times.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Bigger that is a nightmare. That's a horror movie. To me,
that's a horror movie.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I wonder if there is a termite based horror movie.
There must be any question out now I'm gonna have
to look that up. But yeah, no, I thought this
was really cool because the specificity kind of delights me of.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
It of like, this is what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
And I again, I hadn't really thought about how termites are. Yeah,
they are really damaging, and I now I want to
look into how they work more, which is annoying everything.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
They destroy everything.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, and I want to look into I do love
what you were talking about Eves, of her just curiosity
even as a young child, and being able to connect
those concepts of these kind of the outside world, the
outdoors world, and in the books she read.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I desperately want to know what one the one book
that she said was too boring.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
But I just think that is that when you can
have that curiosity and you do get so excited about
these things that maybe no one else really thinks about.
And I just I really enjoy when we get to
learn about people like that.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
I think it's also an amazing story about understanding when
someone is passionate about something, how that feels contagious and
when you really dig into it, and how easily it
could also be stamped out like that. For a second
she was like, h this is bory. I don't like you.
You're being racist or discriminatory, or this issue is happening.
I'm off, I'm gone, But then finding someone else come
(36:59):
in and being like, no, but here, this is again
like having one boring professor who doesn't make it interesting,
and then having that next professor who is like highlighting everything,
resparking what you already had a passion for, but growing
that and what that actually looks like and why that's
so important for so many people, young women, especially especially
for those who have been told they couldn't do it
(37:20):
all along or who didn't think about it. It sounds
like she did not have that problem. She knew the
young age. She's like, I can do this, Like teaching
herself to read a bout following someone's fingers while they're
reading is a phenomenal testament to her ability to learn
and quickly catch on. If you know, titling her a prodigy.
But with that, growing in the passion and loving and
(37:41):
finding out something that you do care about, and then
having people along the way to grow that passion with you, well.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
It just goes to show you how much a single
tiny moment in somebody's life can define the course of
the rest of their life. And how much nurture interest
that a child shows and in whatever way are allowing
them giving them the room to explore that interest. How
(38:09):
that matters so much because you can have a spark,
there can be a flame when you when you relate
to something, but if it's not like if you don't
blow air onto it, if you don't if you don't
allow it to grow, then it can just be extinguished,
you know, by the drop of rain that comes through
that next boring professor. So yeah, I think that matters
(38:33):
a lot, And that could happen to us so many,
so many for so many different things in our lives.
You know, we don't follow every single thread that starts
to unspool. But I think it's nice to see how
there was a spark and then maybe it went away,
but that it was still there and it was still
there's still an ember of it to continue the metaphor
(38:56):
at some point that was able to spark back up
later on when she did have that professor so and
it just got more. She just honed in on it
over time. At first it was just you know, natch,
it was the natural world. And then eventually down the
line it got too specifically termites, and you know what,
like I was thinking any too, like about you were
(39:19):
talking about termites being cool and not thinking about them
in that way. My when I think of termites, I
think about learning about like the elementary level version of biology,
whatever that was, and we would just see these big
pictures of termite mounds, or we would go to like
a natural history museum and they would have a big
(39:41):
plastic replica of a termite mound, and I that's what
I thought about when I thought about termites. But it's
interesting because I never, as a person who was conditioned
more into like householder world later on and being an
adult and doing it all things and being a homeowner,
(40:02):
I only thought about termites. I no longer thought about
termite mounts. I only thought about termites destruction of my
personal property. It's very American. So so it now in
reading about doctor Margaret, it made me think about how
when I think about ants, I think about their colonies
(40:22):
and how much they work together and how they build.
Why don't I think about termites the same way. They
seem to have this also very connected community that works
together to build a thing. They're building this thing that's
so much bigger than each individual one of their them is,
and that they have to work together to build. And
(40:42):
I can appreciate antswer that way people keep their own
small ant colonies, but I've never thought about termites in
that way. So it definitely helped me reframe that.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Now.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
I'm still not a bug person in general. I have
to say that I shouldn't have gave that given that
disclaimer at the top, but I do recognize how much usefulness,
like how good they are and them being themselves of course,
but then there are so many things that humans have
(41:13):
because of insects that we learn from them, products that
are derived from from from the work that they do. Essentially,
so shout out to doctor Margaret for studying them. Yeah,
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
I still have the mindset that they're trying to destroy
my world.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, see, this is what I think is cool.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Though, I honestly like respect the termite because we have
had they can instill that fear in you. Yeah, and
they had to have all this research done on them,
and they're so small, but they can cause so much damage.
I just feel like I have not respected the termite
properly before this, and I appreciate doctor Margaret are helping
(42:00):
me to realize, Yeah, there's no joke.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
There's no joke.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
There are no they are no joke, as the past
control people will tell you. I also want to add here,
I can definitely see ease that you've been taking time
to connect with your creativity. With all the metaphors we
just got, which were amazing, like one right after another,
I was like, oh, yeah, she is on her vibing
(42:26):
creativity self right now with her adventures and fun I
love it.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
I appreciate you.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Know it's funny because I mean metaphor and parable is
a big part of religious and philosophical storytelling, and so
I have been noticing so much, so many good metaphors
and religious study essentially, I'm like, wow, like that was
that was really good? That helped me understand that better
(42:55):
I connect me to that.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yes, and we appreciate you taking the time and your
wild schedule in your different time zones to share this
story with us, because I for one loved it. It
was awesome. I'm so excited.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
I won't forget it anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Oh man, Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for
being here, and as always, we can't wait till next time.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
But in the meantime, where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Y'all can just go to my website, which is eves
Jeffcote dot com. That is y V E S J
E F F C A T dot com. You can
get to all the things from there. You can sign
up for my newsletter if you want to keep up
with me that way. You can also go to my
instagram if Instagram is your thing. I'm at not apologizing,
(43:54):
and you can find me on many, many, many other
episodes of Stuff Mom Never Told You, So dig deep
into the archives find all the episodes of other women
in history who had great firsts. We're pioneering in their fields.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yes, yes, absolutely go check out all of those things.
If you haven't already, Listeners, if you would like to
contact us, you can. You can email us at Hello
A stuff When Never Told You. You can find us
a blue Skype, Mom Stuff podcast or instagrament to talk
at stuff when Never Told You. We're also on YouTube.
We have some new merchandise at Cotton Bureau, and we
have a book you can get wherever you get your books.
Thanks as always to our super producer Christina or executive
(44:29):
producer My and your contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks
you for listening. Stuff Never Told You is production by
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you
can check out the Art Radio app, Apple Podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Anny and Smantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm welcome to stuff I've never told you productive iHeartRadio,
and once again we are so happy to do another
female first, and that.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Means we are happy to welcome back Eves.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome Eve. Hey, Hey, I'm so happy to have you.
I didn't do my introduction like I normally do. I
was gonna say intrepid international Eaves. I had already planned it.
I appreciate that. Well, thank you. But you have been
(00:47):
doing a lot of traveling. What's been going on with you?
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Eves? Yeah? I just.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Twenty four hours ago, maybe somewhere between twenty four hours
and forty eight hours ago go I left New Delhi, India,
and now I am in Cape Town, South Africa. And honestly,
you know, I was thinking that I haven't gotten the
chance to mourn leaving India, because I haven't gotten a
(01:16):
chance to feel sad about not being in India anymore,
because truly I loved India. I'm not good at picking favorites.
I don't really care to pick favorites because I like
different things for different reasons and it's just really hard
for me to make those decisions. But I do like
India's really up there. For me, like, I had a
great experience there because I felt like, I feel like
I got to experience so many different parts of the spectrum,
(01:41):
and I got to experience it with people who lived
in the places that I was in, which was in
Utra Khand, which is in the northeast. It's a state
in the northeast. I was very near the Himalayas. And
I also got to experience New Delhi, which is a huge, huge, huge,
huge city. Twenty something million people there, I believe, or
like thirty million people something like that. And I got
(02:06):
to meet people who lived in those that place too,
and people who were there from other parts of Indian
than people who were there from outside of India who
had you know, Indian ethnic origins. So I like, I
feel like I got to experience a huge breath of it.
And I was fed a lot of food, and I
learned a lot about hospitality in cooking and sharing meals
(02:31):
and like serving during my time there, because there was
a period when I was at a religious spiritual philosophical
retreat basically, and I was fed three meals a day,
and I was that food was prepared by some of
the other people who were there, and I shared these
(02:52):
meals with the other the nuns basically who lived there.
And there is a lot, there's so much. Anytime I
go somewhere, I learned I take something about hospitality with me,
like the way people treat their guests, the way they
serve them. And I mean, I couldn't do anything on
(03:17):
my own. The moment I started sniffling, I like, all
of the remedies were suggested to me, given to me.
I was given this thing of clothes. Put these clothes
in your mouth, hold it here. I was given more milk,
don't come, don't wake up this early, don't worry about
doing this. Do you want this? Do you need this?
Are you okay? Given this arivedic remedy I was giving?
(03:41):
Do you want these pills? I was like, oh my,
do you know the feeling of being overwhelmed with care?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
It's like it's a great feeling because it makes you feel.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So special and important. And then it's also like, oh
my God, like, am I like this to people?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Can I be like this to you know? Am I
this helpful? I want to be like that?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Because you know, I was talking to them about it,
and they were saying one of the other people who
was there, who was Indian, was like, yeah, like I
do this and my child is like, they hate, they
hate how She was like, I'm sorry for how you
know how how much we were trying to take care
of you, but it's just like how how I do things,
how we do things. She was like, my child doesn't
(04:24):
like it at all, That's what she said. She's like,
my child doesn't love it. So you know, I had
a great experience in all ways. And I got the nice, chill,
tranquil side of meditating and looking at the mountains, and
(04:45):
I got the other side being in the hectic chaos
of New Delhi traffic with getting into accidents and nobody
saying anything.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It's like just another day, didn't matter.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
It's all yellow to each other and move on.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Even if that like one of our drivers just like
barely glanced in the rear view mirror and didn't say
anything at all.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
This is just normal. So yeah, loved it, honestly loved it.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah, that's great, and I do really relate to the
I experienced that a lot when I leave a place
and you're just so sad to have left it because
it was so beautiful. And you know, there was so
much more to see and do, so I get mourning
a place. And I also when I was in China,
I had a I wasn't good with chopsticks in the beginning.
(05:39):
I'm great with them now listeners, but in the beginning,
and people.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Were concerned for me that I wouldn't eat enough.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
So this older Chinese woman took me to a bakery,
an American style bakery, and was like, you need cake.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
It was so sweet.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
It was like such a such a funny she can't
use chip, Let's get her American cake, Like thank you,
thank you.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
It's nice.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
It is nice to see that kind of hospitality and
people wanting to take care of you.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
But yeah, we're so.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Glad you could make this workout as you all through
all your travels. And I am extremely excited about who
we're talking about today because we have said before we've
shared our thoughts on bugs, and I mentioned that maybe
we should have somebody and I would like to talk
about some insects some more. And here we go.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So who are we talking about today? Eves?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Today we're talking about doctor Margaret S. Collins and the
insect that we were talking about today that she largely
focused on was one you might not expect.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
I'll save it for later.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You'll get the nice surprise of which bug it is
that she focused on.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
But yes, I had that in mind.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
How we previously talked about how it would be cool
to talk about an entomologist, and I had never thought
about bringing one onto the show, So I appreciate that
you gave that suggestion. So, doctor Margaret S. Collins was
the first black American woman to be awarded a PhD
that involved entomology at a major university. She was the
first entomologist at Florida A and M University, and she
(07:27):
was the third Black American woman zoologist. But she herself
described herself as an ecologist, and her story is really fascinating.
And I really liked the way that she arrived at
her work in the field.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
So excited to talk about it. Who I am too?
So shall I get into the history? Yes? Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
So she was born Margaret James in Institute, West Virginia,
on September fourth, nineteen twenty two, and her parents were
Luella and Rollins James, and she was the fourth of
five children. Her dad got his bachelor's and master's degree
from West Virginia State College and Tuskegee Institute, and he
worked at Tuskegee for a period, then he went to
(08:23):
teach vocational agriculture at West Virginia State. And Luella, Margaret's mother,
she wanted to become an archaeologist, but there weren't a
ton of opportunities for education, and she went to West
Virginia State but she didn't finish to get her degree.
But Luella was a big reader. And here's a quote
(08:44):
from Margaret. She said, quote, My parents collected an impressive
library for their income level, and a regular feature of
the evenings would be one member reading aloud to the
rest of the family, with the youngest on the lap
of the reader. In my case, I learned to read
by following the of the reader.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Just the end of the quote.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
When Margaret was six years old, she was allowed to
check out books from the West Virginia State College library.
And according to Margaret, she grew up in the woods
in the barn. Two of her favorite books in her
childhood were Two Little Savages and Rolf in the Woods
by Ernest Thompson CN. And she would go outside and
(09:23):
collect interesting critters, what she called interesting critters, and when
she started bringing home these creatures, her dad would encourage
her to identify them in his books. And here's another
quote from Margaret. I had access to an array of
books on natural history, including the massive volumes of the
Nature Library. My favorite books in the series were Rogers
(09:46):
The Shell Book, dip Mars The Reptile Book, and Jordan
and Everman's The Fish Book, each of which contained English
technical terms as well as Latin names. She also learned
from her neighbors. There was a doctor named doctor Sinclair
who let her come to his house and read as
(10:07):
much as she wanted to, and his mother was previously enslaved,
and she talked to Margaret about things like making soap
and how to use medicinal plants. Margaret also spent time
with John Matthews, who was a scholar of patient and
African literature, and Margaret later talked about the importance of
her experience with books and how much she read them
(10:29):
when she was young. Early on, she said this, I
suspect that plenty of books in early unrestricted reading were
quite important. Hearing about scientists doing adventurous things and reading
the works of naturalists William Beebe were probably important. Perhaps
the biggest influence of all was contact with individuals who
found the discipline of biology fulfilling. Enthusiasm sometimes behaves like
(10:53):
an infectious agent. So I really loved this part of
her story of how her outside time is interacting with
her reading selfishly because of my own personal interests, like
I love outdoors things, I also love books, and both
(11:16):
of those things were very formative in my childhood. And
I think it's really cool that she had access to
those books like so at such a young age, and
that her parents encouraged her to do it, because I
could see one seeing these things in a book but
being totally out of touch with how that showed up
in the real world, or like going outside and playing
(11:38):
with things but not necessarily knowing how they worked, not
knowing about ecology, you know, not knowing about environments or ecosystems,
and things like this, like the reality of things not
touching the academics of things. And it seems like, very
early on, even if it wasn't in a super formalized way,
(12:00):
she was able to weave those two worlds together, and
so her world in books was very alive to her,
in her world in nature was very alive to her
as well. And I think that's cool because you know,
a lot of the time you can you can read
something in books, but then that can you can get
(12:21):
excited about it. Then when you're young, but then that
can that can fade away, like some of your interests
or enthusiasm, some of the excitement and fun around a
thing can really start to fade and dissipate.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And so I think these two things being weaved.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Together is a part of her story that I, you know,
can gather a lot of inspiration from and I'm happy
to learn about. So she did really well in school too,
and she ended up skipping two or three grades. So
I saw two grades in one place, but I also
saw that she skipped three grades. So she skipped like
(12:57):
two at first, and then later on she skipped another,
so that she was eleven years old in her freshman
class in high school. But the specifics, the particulars of
that aren't even really that important. The important part is
that she was pretty She did pretty well in school.
She was good at school, and some of the titles
you'll see in some of the articles about her, you'll
(13:17):
see child prodigy. So she was very good at school. However,
her social life wasn't the greatest. Of course, there was
a huge age difference between her and her classmates, but
she did say later on that she didn't necessarily regret
how her social life panned out at the time because
(13:40):
it reinforced her self sufficiency. I feel like this is
one of those sentiments that often comes in hindsight, because
it's like in the struggle, you don't necessarily think the
same way, and you know, your experience of having the
struggle when you're in the struggle is still very real.
Probably wasn't that great for her, as I would imagine,
(14:03):
but clearly she did feel like she gained some grit
through it. She ended up graduating from West Virginia State
College's Laboratory High School in nineteen thirty seven when she
was fourteen years old, and she enrolled at West Virginia
State College on an academic scholarship. So she didn't really
want to go to West Virginia State, but her family
(14:25):
was already paying for her older sister's education at Hampton Institute,
and they couldn't afford for her to go to another school.
So this is kind of like what I was talking about.
She said that at first, she lost interest in science
because she had a teacher who made it boring, and
that cost her the scholarship. I think that can happen
(14:46):
a lot as you get older, because I mean the
world becomes more jury in general, a lot more grey.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Tones on things as you start to get older.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
So that can happen a lot, like a lot more
gray tones on things, and that cost her the scholarship.
So her parents started trying trying to help her pay
for her tuition during her second year, but they had
trouble paying for her tuition, so she started doing domestic
work over the summers to help pay for her own tuition.
(15:19):
So financially challenging, also academically challenging a difficult period for her,
but regardless, she did eventually find two mentors, Toy Davis
I think that's how you pronounce it, tye and Frederick Lanner.
So Davis was a black biologist with a PhD from Harvard,
(15:41):
and she had sent a sample of a colony of
marine animals to him for identification, and he had to
send it off to a lab. There was a waiting process,
and during that time he made sure that she had
a microscope that she could use and then he showed
her how to use a taxonomic key. And then he
also introduced her to a book that was pretty important
(16:04):
in bology called Freshwater Biology by Ward and Whipple. And he, however,
was soon drafted into World War two. And there was
another professor that Margaret had already been talking to who
had come over, and he was a professor of German.
He's a white professor named Frederick Lehner. He became her
(16:26):
mentor upon Davis's suggestion after Davis left. So Margaret majored
in bology with minors and physics and German. And she
ended up marrying Howard. University pre met student named Bernard E.
Strickland in July nineteen forty two, but he was also
(16:48):
soon drafted into the war. She graduated with her Bachelor
of Science in nineteen forty three. So I'm not so
much sure about their personal life, her life married to Bernard,
I don't really know much about their relationship, about how
they got along, but I do know that because he
(17:12):
was drafted, she didn't really spend a lot of personal
time with him, so he was pretty far away during
this time. And while she was studying either way, she
had planned to start a business collecting specimens for biological
supply houses. So she enrolled for a few classes at
(17:32):
the University of Chicago and her plan was just to
take enough courses in field zoology and ecology so she
could start her business. But as often happens, we plan
things with that isn't necessarily how they pan out, and
during registration her advisor had turned out to be the
zoologist Alfred Emerson, who was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
(17:56):
He drum Roe please was a termite expert, and he
managed the largest turmite collection and related looking.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Reprint library in the world.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Introduction of the insect of the hour termites. So, yes,
are you a fan of termites?
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Annie? Yeah, I just was not expect this was a twist.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
I was like, oh, termites, I haven't given them much thought, luckily,
because it's never been a problem for me.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
And now I'm really curious.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
As a homeowner, I have good and much thought and
I'm like, but why.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, like why yeah, yeah? So you know I did
wonder this in learning about Margaret's story, not so sure
I even know now about what her draw to turmites was.
I know a little bit, as we'll learn about how
(18:59):
she got into studying termites, but I'm not fully sure
why she continued to learn about them. What was it
about the insects specifically that made her fall in love
with this specific topic. But she did start taking his
course and she became intoxicated by zoology. Even though she
was really interested in zoology, she still had trouble keeping
(19:23):
up with expenses. At the time, black people couldn't go
to the University of West Virginia, so the state would
offer one hundred and twenty five dollars per year towards
an out of state tuition, but that still wasn't enough
to cover the money that she needed. She ended up
getting a night job at a defense plant because she
was only eating about ten meals a week. But her
(19:46):
professors noticed her interest in the field of zoology, and
Emerson found out somehow that she was struggling financially, and
he offered her an assistantship and she was assigned to
look after the termite collection. So over the next years.
She's still an avid reader. She reads all the books
in Emerson's offers office library except for one that is
(20:08):
mentioned in the article I was reading about her, which
was like apparently very dull and boring. I can't remember
right now what the subject of that book was, but
I'm like, that's interesting. Out of how many books in
his library, she determined that this single was dull and boring,
because I'm sure a lot of them were also very
dense and academic, but she read a lot of them,
(20:32):
and even after all of that, she still hadn't chosen
her specialty. But then she found a book in his
library called Termite City, and it reminded her of the
books that she read in her childhood. So I love
that link back to her thinking of this as something
that has more like I guess, heart to it, Like
there's an emotional connection there that makes that reminds her
(20:55):
of why she's interested in why she loves it so much.
Is it's very heartwarming and wholesome to think about that connection.
But when her second year at the university was over
World War two and ended, her husband, Bernard came back
and he started going back to Howard for pre med.
(21:18):
So because Bernard came back, a few things changed.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
She gave up.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Doing full time classes at grad school. She ended up
getting a job as an instructor in the biology department
at Howard, and she wanted to make more money for
the family and to help support Bernard's studies, and she
also wanted to be with him because he had been
away for so long. So she spent the next three
summers in Chicago. She finished her coursework and did her research,
(21:50):
and Emerson was still a mentor to her, and he
was for decades. But when he was building a team
to go on an expedition the Marshall Islands, he did
not invite her and he said that he thought young
women should not go on expeditions, and he insisted that
(22:12):
Margaret take her finals and finish her thesis instead. But
their you know, professional relationship continued even after that, but
this was a point that he stood on. Margaret's thesis
was titled Differences in Toleration of drying among species of
termites reticular terms, and she this is her a seminal
(22:39):
work in her career. So doctor Margaret left her marriage
in nineteen forty nine. That year she got her PhD
in zoology from the University of Chicago, leading to her
first So there were other black American female zoologists before her,
(23:05):
but she was a pioneer in her field. Still during
the nineteen fifties, Emerson gave Margaret termite specimens he collected
on his research trips to Guyana, and this his research
in Guyana would really pan out to be something that
(23:26):
was important for doctor Margaret in her lifetime too. So
she was promoted from instructor to an assistant professor at Howard,
but Howard wasn't really quick to promote women to higher positions.
There were also problems that she herself had with Howard
at the time, like she didn't really care for the
(23:47):
president of Howard, who was Mordecai Johnson. She thought that
the zoology department was geared too much toward medical training.
There's a quote where she said it was a place
of entrenched chauvinism. She said that Mordecai Johnson didn't like
independence of thought, and when she was at Howard, she
(24:08):
said that he said he didn't want her to wear trousers.
But all of these reasons led her to quit at
Howard and in nineteen fifty one she became a professor
at Florida Agricultural Mechanical College, which is n HBCU, and
in nineteen fifty one she married Herbert L. Collins. Her
(24:31):
second marriage she had gotten divorced from Bernard, and so
she and Herbert had two sons, and she ended up
becoming the chair of Florida A and M's biology department
in nineteen fifty three. So that year she continued her
field studies. She began collecting specimens in the Everglades and
(24:52):
in Highlands State Park for a study of Florida termites.
And she would even take her family on collecting trips
where she was collecting sp vestments in the Everglades. So
this was her her career in zoology and ecology, but
she also did things outside of that. So there was
(25:15):
one time where she was invited to lecture on her
research at a university. It was a predominantly white university
and at the time the school got a bomb threat
and so her invitation was rescinded. Margaret was black, of course,
so it doesn't take much, you know, for violence to
(25:36):
be meeted upon you or threatened against you when you're
black at time like this. But she was also involved
in activism, So when Florida A and M called for
a bus boycott in Tallahassee, she offered to drive people
to work, and her involvement and her and that kind
of civil rights activism did lead to more surveillance by
state and local police as well as the FBI. And
(26:00):
there was a period between nineteen fifty two and nineteen
fifty seven where she didn't publish any scientific papers, although
she had been publishing I think like one or two
a year up until that time. It seems like her
civil rights efforts took priority. But in nineteen fifty eight
she did start publishing again. However, she had fallen behind
(26:23):
and keeping up with the science. So while she was
at Florida A and M. I believe, she wrote a
book and there was a quote where she talked about
how she had gotten sent back in illustration with the
when she was writing the book, and she didn't really
understand the illustration, and she realized that she had she
(26:44):
had fallen behind in her own personal work of keeping
up with the field, and so she wanted to stop working.
And she was like, if you don't let me go
and take some time off, then I'm just I'm just
going to leave. So I let her take time I'm
off And she got a National Science Foundation Summer Research
Fellowship to study new developments in genetics and in a
(27:07):
molecular biology at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Lab and
from sixty one nineteen sixty one. In nineteen sixty two,
she took her leave of absence from Florida A and M,
and she got another grant from the National Science Foundation.
She ended up studying for a year at the University
of Minnesota, where she was a research associate and at
(27:28):
the Minnesota Agricultural Experimental Station, and when she was there
she worked on studies of North American termites. While she
was in Minnesota, unfortunately, she was injured in a lab
accident and her lungs were permanently damaged from that, so
she divorced her second husband in nineteen sixty three. The
(27:50):
next year after that, she moved back to DC. She
became a full professor at Howard and she took a
tenured position at Federal City College, and she also became
a research associate at the Smithsonian. So a couple of
her students from Guyana encouraged her to reopen a field
(28:13):
station that Alfred Emerson had opened in Guyana and that
had been closed in the late nineteen fifties. But because
these students encouraged her, then doctor Margaret was.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Into the idea.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
So from nineteen seventy five, around nineteen seventy five nineteen
seventy six, she started getting in talks with the government
of Guyana, and in January of nineteen seventy eight she
got official government sponsorship in Guyana and from the Guyana
Department of the Army. She began rebuilding that field station
in Cartabo. With support from the government, travel grants from Howard,
(28:56):
and some funding from the Smithsonian, she was able to
move forward with the rebuilding of that station. She also
began researching defense mechanisms and termites, so basically the chemicals
that termites used to defend themselves from predators, and she
(29:19):
was studying and collecting in a lot of places. She
studying and collected termites in Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Surinam,
the Cayman Islands, Guatemala, Panama, and a lot of parts
of the United States. So she basically said that like,
(29:40):
termites are tropical, which I didn't know. She's like, yeah,
the termites in the United States are fine and everything,
but like the real ones are the ones elsewhere. So
she's had to study in a lot of different places
to do her collecting. She led conditions in the nineteen eighties,
(30:02):
and here's an excerpt from a letter that she wrote
to members of her group on one of the Earthwatch
expeditions that she went to in eighty three to eighty four.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
This is what she said.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
More than thirteen thousand insects specimens were taken, plus the
ectoparasite stuff. Samples of about a dozen identifiable medicinal plants,
along with photographs and data on their utilization were taken,
and the plants are now in the hands of specialists
at the US National Museum. So in the late seventies
(30:37):
to the nineties she researched termites and Guyana through the
Smithsonian's Department of Entomology, and throughout all her expeditions she
would inform Guyana's military ways to build that would avoid
termite damage and inform them of how to use termite
excretions to make stronger building materials. And the specimens that
(31:03):
she collected became part of the Collins Collection at the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. So she retired from
Howard in nineteen eighty three. She ended up taking an
unpaid senior research position at the Smithsonian as well, But
during her trip to Guyana in eighty three to eighty four,
(31:24):
she had gotten d in gay fever and the issues
that she had resulting from that kept her out of
the field. During this time, she worked on updating and
preserving the Smithsonian's termite collection, and really she recognized how
important that work in the museum was, but she really
(31:45):
considered her herself like a field of colleges. She really
wanted to be back out in the field, and eventually
she did get back out into the field. In December
of nineteen ninety four, when she was seventy two years old,
she returned to Guyana with Matthew Kane, who was a
staff member at the Smithsonian who specialized in termite gut microbes,
(32:06):
and for a few weeks she collected specimens she needed
to describe a new termite species, and I think there
is a termite species that is named after her. So
she died in April nineteen ninety six when she was
doing field research in the Cayman Islands. And here's I'll
(32:27):
just read you a quote from there's a text called
Black Women's Scientists in the United States that has a
bio on her. And here's a quote from that bio.
Collins's research spanned five decades and encompassed nearly the entire
field of termite zoology, the evolution of desiccation resistance and termites,
various termite species, tolerance of high temperatures, defensive behavior in
(32:50):
South American termites including chemical defenses, termite ecology, species abundance
in virgin and disturbed tropical rainforest, and behavioral ecology, taxonomy
and entomology.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
End quote.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
And I just wanted to read that quote from that
bio because they encapsulated the breath for termite research a
lot better than I would have been able to, not
being a termite expert myself. But that just goes to
show you how wide ranging her research was in that
specific field and how much of an impact it did
(33:26):
have on later research and researchers that came after her.
She's remembered as a great world authority on the termite
diversity in the Caribbean and in Guyana. And that's the
story of doctor Margaret S.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Colin.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I love this. Okay, First of all, thank you, as always, Eves.
I'm so happy to learn about this. Second of all, listeners,
I'm really sorry we don't have videos sometimes because Samantha
and I were having very different reactions to the termite terms.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
I was very excited. Samantha was not excited at all.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
There's atentive disgust. I mean, come on, yeah, well, more confusion.
The confusion was more so more prominent than the disgust.
But because I'm like, really digest the systems of termites
and we're using this for buildings.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
What is happening? What is happening? How big are these termites?
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Oh, that's the other question, Like these are like the
swarms of what I think of, and like when they
built colonies. When we're talking about colonies, I'm like, yeah,
they've destroyed an entire building or forest, Like what what
are these things?
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (34:50):
In my mind, So also again a lot of confusion.
Speaker 3 (34:54):
I just imagine that anything that I've seen, if it
also exists in the tropics, that it's astronomically larger. Like
I don't know, I just feel like everything there is
bigger because it has more more space to grow, it's
more undisturbed. So I just imagine anything that's here that
I know I'm small. If there's a species of spider
(35:16):
it was, there's like three times.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Bigger that is a nightmare. That's a horror movie. To me,
that's a horror movie.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I wonder if there is a termite based horror movie.
There must be any question out now I'm gonna have
to look that up. But yeah, no, I thought this
was really cool because the specificity kind of delights me of.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
It of like, this is what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
And I again, I hadn't really thought about how termites are. Yeah,
they are really damaging, and I now I want to
look into how they work more, which is annoying everything.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
They destroy everything.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, and I want to look into I do love
what you were talking about Eves, of her just curiosity
even as a young child, and being able to connect
those concepts of these kind of the outside world, the
outdoors world, and in the books she read.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I desperately want to know what one the one book
that she said was too boring.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
But I just think that is that when you can
have that curiosity and you do get so excited about
these things that maybe no one else really thinks about.
And I just I really enjoy when we get to
learn about people like that.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
I think it's also an amazing story about understanding when
someone is passionate about something, how that feels contagious and
when you really dig into it, and how easily it
could also be stamped out like that. For a second
she was like, h this is bory. I don't like you.
You're being racist or discriminatory, or this issue is happening.
I'm off, I'm gone, But then finding someone else come
(36:59):
in and being like, no, but here, this is again
like having one boring professor who doesn't make it interesting,
and then having that next professor who is like highlighting everything,
resparking what you already had a passion for, but growing
that and what that actually looks like and why that's
so important for so many people, young women, especially especially
for those who have been told they couldn't do it
(37:20):
all along or who didn't think about it. It sounds
like she did not have that problem. She knew the
young age. She's like, I can do this, Like teaching
herself to read a bout following someone's fingers while they're
reading is a phenomenal testament to her ability to learn
and quickly catch on. If you know, titling her a prodigy.
But with that, growing in the passion and loving and
(37:41):
finding out something that you do care about, and then
having people along the way to grow that passion with you, well.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
It just goes to show you how much a single
tiny moment in somebody's life can define the course of
the rest of their life. And how much nurture interest
that a child shows and in whatever way are allowing
them giving them the room to explore that interest. How
(38:09):
that matters so much because you can have a spark,
there can be a flame when you when you relate
to something, but if it's not like if you don't
blow air onto it, if you don't if you don't
allow it to grow, then it can just be extinguished,
you know, by the drop of rain that comes through
that next boring professor. So yeah, I think that matters
(38:33):
a lot, And that could happen to us so many,
so many for so many different things in our lives.
You know, we don't follow every single thread that starts
to unspool. But I think it's nice to see how
there was a spark and then maybe it went away,
but that it was still there and it was still
there's still an ember of it to continue the metaphor
(38:56):
at some point that was able to spark back up
later on when she did have that professor so and
it just got more. She just honed in on it
over time. At first it was just you know, natch,
it was the natural world. And then eventually down the
line it got too specifically termites, and you know what,
like I was thinking any too, like about you were
(39:19):
talking about termites being cool and not thinking about them
in that way. My when I think of termites, I
think about learning about like the elementary level version of biology,
whatever that was, and we would just see these big
pictures of termite mounds, or we would go to like
a natural history museum and they would have a big
(39:41):
plastic replica of a termite mound, and I that's what
I thought about when I thought about termites. But it's
interesting because I never, as a person who was conditioned
more into like householder world later on and being an
adult and doing it all things and being a homeowner,
(40:02):
I only thought about termites. I no longer thought about
termite mounts. I only thought about termites destruction of my
personal property. It's very American. So so it now in
reading about doctor Margaret, it made me think about how
when I think about ants, I think about their colonies
(40:22):
and how much they work together and how they build.
Why don't I think about termites the same way. They
seem to have this also very connected community that works
together to build a thing. They're building this thing that's
so much bigger than each individual one of their them is,
and that they have to work together to build. And
(40:42):
I can appreciate antswer that way people keep their own
small ant colonies, but I've never thought about termites in
that way. So it definitely helped me reframe that.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
Now.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
I'm still not a bug person in general. I have
to say that I shouldn't have gave that given that
disclaimer at the top, but I do recognize how much usefulness,
like how good they are and them being themselves of course,
but then there are so many things that humans have
(41:13):
because of insects that we learn from them, products that
are derived from from from the work that they do. Essentially,
so shout out to doctor Margaret for studying them. Yeah,
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
I still have the mindset that they're trying to destroy
my world.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, see, this is what I think is cool.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Though, I honestly like respect the termite because we have
had they can instill that fear in you. Yeah, and
they had to have all this research done on them,
and they're so small, but they can cause so much damage.
I just feel like I have not respected the termite
properly before this, and I appreciate doctor Margaret are helping
(42:00):
me to realize, Yeah, there's no joke.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
There's no joke.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
There are no they are no joke, as the past
control people will tell you. I also want to add here,
I can definitely see ease that you've been taking time
to connect with your creativity. With all the metaphors we
just got, which were amazing, like one right after another,
I was like, oh, yeah, she is on her vibing
(42:26):
creativity self right now with her adventures and fun I
love it.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
I appreciate you.
Speaker 3 (42:33):
Know it's funny because I mean metaphor and parable is
a big part of religious and philosophical storytelling, and so
I have been noticing so much, so many good metaphors
and religious study essentially, I'm like, wow, like that was
that was really good? That helped me understand that better
(42:55):
I connect me to that.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yes, and we appreciate you taking the time and your
wild schedule in your different time zones to share this
story with us, because I for one loved it. It
was awesome. I'm so excited.
Speaker 4 (43:19):
I won't forget it anytime soon.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Oh man, Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for
being here, and as always, we can't wait till next time.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
But in the meantime, where can the good listeners find you?
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Y'all can just go to my website, which is eves
Jeffcote dot com. That is y V E S J
E F F C A T dot com. You can
get to all the things from there. You can sign
up for my newsletter if you want to keep up
with me that way. You can also go to my
instagram if Instagram is your thing. I'm at not apologizing,
(43:54):
and you can find me on many, many, many other
episodes of Stuff Mom Never Told You, So dig deep
into the archives find all the episodes of other women
in history who had great firsts. We're pioneering in their fields.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yes, yes, absolutely go check out all of those things.
If you haven't already, Listeners, if you would like to
contact us, you can. You can email us at Hello
A stuff When Never Told You. You can find us
a blue Skype, Mom Stuff podcast or instagrament to talk
at stuff when Never Told You. We're also on YouTube.
We have some new merchandise at Cotton Bureau, and we
have a book you can get wherever you get your books.
Thanks as always to our super producer Christina or executive
(44:29):
producer My and your contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks
you for listening. Stuff Never Told You is production by
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you
can check out the Art Radio app, Apple Podcast, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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