On the drive to school, at the first sign of trouble, “she made me get on the floorboard,” says the older son of pioneering Black entomologist Margaret S. Collins. He’s remembering the tense 1956 civil rights bus boycott in Tallahassee, Fla. As soon as young Herbert had wriggled to a safer spot on the floor of the car, his mom would stomp the gas pedal and hope to outrun the police once again.
Collins, on her morning drives to Herbert’s school and then on to her university faculty job, was giving rides to people boycotting the city’s racially segregated public buses. Tallahassee’s seven-month boycott isn’t as famous as the one in Montgomery, Ala., which started in late 1955, but the Tallahassee boycott also stirred fierce white pushback. The legal system made an example of 21 other local activists offering rides, charging them with running a profitable city transportation system without getting a franchise from the city to do so. The targeted activists were each fined $500 and, if caught in illegal activity during the next year, would spend 60 days in jail.
Herbert still remembers crouching in the car, watching his mother’s foot on the gas. “I was like, ‘You’re going to make a hole in the floor if you press it much harder,’ ” he says. They never caught her though.
“I think her life would make a great movie,” says entomologist Jessica Ware of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
In her science, Collins specialized in termites, studying some of the specimens that are now under Ware’s care at the museum. Though these insects are perhaps best known for the damage they can do to human-built structures, Collins’ interest was not in the service of pest control. Instead, she studied the vast, odd universe of termite diversity, glorying in the variations among the world’s 2,000-plus species. Many of these species are not much more likely than a human to eat soggy porch steps.
Though she started by studying termite resistance to dehydration in the lab, Collins in time established herself as a skilled field biologist. She explored in at least 10 countries outside the United States and was recognized as an authority on termites of the Caribbean. Both Collins and Ware, a generation apart, made expeditions into Guyana’s rainforests, rich in insects of interest to science but also in snakes, prowling jaguars and other excitements. Field biology is not for the faint-hearted.
Today, Collins also gets recognized for overcoming the many frictions that came with working in the largely white male world of U.S. midcentury biology. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 1949, made Collins “only the third Black woman zoologist in the country,” at least with a Ph.D., writes science historian Wini Warren in Black Women Scientists in the United States. And that would make Collins America’s first Black female entomologist to earn such an advanced degree.
Captivated by termites
Collins’ childhood shared some details with the life of mathematician Katherine Johnson (SN: 5/25/21), portrayed in the beloved 2016 book and movie Hidden Figures, about Black women at NASA who performed key calculations for early space flight (SN: 12/23/16). Both Johnson and Margaret James Strickland Collins (her name reflecting two marriages) grew up in West Virginia. Both women skipped grades, went early to the same high school and then the same college.
Born Margaret James in 1922 as the lively, precocious fourth of five children, Collins grew up in the college town of Institute, W.Va., finding plenty of countryside to explore nature. Her superpower was not exotic math but reading. She learned just by sitting on the lap of whichever parent did the nightly story time. At age 6, Collins was allowed to borrow any book she could reach in the library of West Virginia State College, a historically Black institution.
Her father, Rollins James, taught agriculture there. He had worked with crop pioneer George Washington Carver and had a master’s degree from Tuskegee Institute. Her mother, Luella, had wanted to become an archaeologist, Collins told Warren during an interview. Luella was a passionate reader, “independent,” even “rebellious,” Collins said.
Collins could certainly question authority. Herbert, the son who crouched on the car floor, remembers her saying about childhood Christmas merriment: “My parents actually tried to make me think that a reindeer could fly through the air.” Having seen a picture of a reindeer, “I knew there’s just no way this reindeer could fly.”
Both math prodigy Johnson, born in 1918, and reindeer-skeptic Collins went to West Virginia State College, now West Virginia State University.
Collins had planned to major in biology, but lessons she described to Warren as “stereotyped, dull and malodorous” and a “gruff and frightening” teacher sapped her interest. She lost her scholarship. Still, summers working kept her in college long enough to encounter a biology professor who helped her ID a water creature she’d discovered in a stream, thereby renewing her interest. Then came World War II.
These were uncertain times. In July 1942, she married Bernard Strickland, a premed student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Within months, though, he was drafted for military service.
After finishing her undergraduate degree the next year, with a major in biology and minors in physics and German, she headed to the University of Chicago. Though the state of West Virginia had a publicly sponsored graduate school, it had only started admitting Black students in 1940 (with the whopping total of three, including Katherine Johnson).
Collins received a $125 stipend from the state, she later told biographer Warren, but it wouldn’t go very far. To help fund grad school, she worked a night shift at a ball bearing factory. After rent and other expenses, she could afford only 10 meals a week — and she was often exhausted.
But it was there that her life took on a new direction. In a chance conversation at class registration, she met American biologist and termite maestro Alfred Emerson. Emerson was “a true giant in termite research,” says Nan-Yao Su, a specialist in termites and one of Collins’ later collaborators, now at the University of Florida’s Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.
Collins was captivated by the course she took with Emerson. He heard of her financial pinch and offered an assistantship that included looking after the termite collection. This began her lifelong fascination.
Termites rank among nature’s star soil engineers in many tropical and subtropical ecosystems. Plus, like bees and ants, they can create complex societies with specialized castes and, in some species, weird body parts. Among the Nasutitermes species Collins studied, some termite soldiers defend themselves by squirting sticky glop from their heads through a glue gun structure “like a less-floppy elephant nose,” Ware says.
Collins’ Ph.D. thesis turned into her first publication on termite tolerance for water loss, which appeared in 1950 in Ecology. Of three species collected in the Chicago area, she found that the one that also ranged widely across the more arid West could survive longer in drier air. The thickness of a waxy outer layer played a role but didn’t explain all the differences in the species’ ranges.
This was one small bit of data for what are giant questions about biodiversity. How can kin eventually become so diverse? And how does evolution create the wild patchwork of species covering the planet? With so many forms around the world, termites are great for exploring these questions.
Though Emerson supported her Ph.D. work, he had his prejudices too. He refused to let Collins join an expedition documenting plants and animals in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands after the war. His objections were just “good ole boy stuff,” sniffs Vernard Lewis, a termite entomologist at the University of California, Berkeley and a Collins biographer. “The field was supposed to be dangerous and adventurous,” and thus not for women back then, Lewis says.
A civil rights activist
With World War II over, Collins’ husband returned to medical school at Howard University. She found an instructor job there in 1947 and joined him. To finish her Ph.D., she would now have to squeeze in remote work and some summers in Chicago. Though her marriage dissolved in 1949, she also finished her Ph.D. that year.
Her new degree won her a promotion to assistant professor at Howard, but she wasn’t hopeful for future prospects. “They refused to promote me because they said I was too young. But it was also because I was a woman,” she later told Warren. Also Collins chafed at the department’s majority focus on medically useful research.
In 1951, Collins accepted a teaching position at what became Florida A&M University, like Howard, one of the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. “The white institutions wouldn’t hire her, so she went back to the HBCUs,” Lewis says. This put her in Tallahassee as civil rights issues were intensifying. Also in 1951, she remarried, taking the name Margaret S. Collins that would be on publications for the rest of her life.
In Florida she could run her own field expeditions looking for termites with help from her husband, Herbert L. Collins. By 1958, she had collected and tested termites’ ability for what she called “water relations” in nine of the 13 termite species known in Florida, including those from the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Over years, Collins explored how some termite species — without the extra-hardened outer armor of ants or beetles — avoid drying to a crisp in a desert while others need steaming rainforests. Evolutionary biologist Barbara Thorne of the University of Maryland in College Park points to the long string of papers on water relations as a highlight of Collins’ research.
Eventually, there would be research trips that included Herbert Jr. and then his younger brother James as field assistants. Collecting termites is a vigorous business, and a big machete was part of their mom’s field gear. “That’s a famous machete,” Lewis says. Herbert Jr. saved it.
But life was not easy. Moving to Tallahassee in the 1950s era of activism exposed the Collins family to toxic racism. Herbert Jr. remembers his mother planning to give a science talk on termites at a traditionally white school, Florida State University. But a phone caller threatened to blow up the science building if a Black speaker dared to lecture there. According to Warren, Collins then searched the building herself and found no bomb. She also found an alternative location for the talk.
During the Tallahassee bus boycott, Collins ended up doing one special midnight drive that “terrified” her, Warren reports. The civil rights group that had called for the boycott got a tip that the police and FBI were about to raid its headquarters. Collins spirited away the membership records with names, addresses and activities.
The family farmhouse also came under threat from violent racists. As the story goes, Collins, despite her other responsibilities, spent nights on the porch with a shotgun. She guarded the house, Herbert Jr. confirms, but not alone.
“We had a rocker and a sofa out there, and when the threats were high, we would sleep out there,” Herbert Jr. remembers. Each parent had a gun. “For a little kid, it was kind of exciting,” he says. The family told jokes, talked about “little things,” at least until the children fell asleep. The dangers of the time were real, but only the mailbox got damaged.
Margaret and Herbert Collins divorced in 1963. She left Florida A&M to return to Howard University in 1964 as a full professor. She juggled the needs of her students, her science and her sons while working at Howard and at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia) as well as traveling for research.
The question of how termites got by with very little water, including in the Sonoran Desert, continued to intrigue her. She worked through species after species. Overall, water, scarce or abundant, and heat are the two main factors shaping where particular termites live, Collins wrote in her chapter in the 1969 two-volume, multi-author opus Biology of Termites.
An energetic seeker of grants and collaborations, she traveled in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America to explore for termites. From the late 1970s, she held (volunteer) research associate status at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and worked on its termite collection, which now includes several dozen of her own specimens.
“In many ways, she was just an enthusiastic person,” says Thorne, who was a co-adventurer and coauthor with Collins. “The museum stuff, the lectures, the teaching, whatever — she loved all that. But she was at her best in the field.”
Margaret Collins, the ‘termite lady’
Among the termite marvels that lured Collins into the tropics was that glue-blasting “less-floppy elephant nose” (as Ware described it). This defense mechanism appeared to have evolved twice. Soldiers belonging to species of Nasutitermes and Subulitermes can do it, yet those species sprouted from rather different branches of the termites’ evolutionary tree. “Parallel evolution” is what Emerson and other scientists had called the phenomenon of not-so-related look-alikes.
Collins worked with biochemist Glenn Prestwich to question the notion. Delving into the unusual compounds in the glue convinced them that the cocktails are both so odd and similar that it’s too improbable they arose independently. “We were surprised,” Prestwich and Collins reported in 1981 in Biochemical Systematics and Ecology.
The best sense of what Collins faced as she did all this termite exploring may come from her own words on a pdf of three aged, typewritten pages she had sent colleagues about a mishap in Colombia’s Amazon rainforest. Titled “Me and My Maggot or My Duel with Dermatobia hominis,” the account features a parasitic fly larva that burrows into living flesh and grows spines.
“The whole sorry episode” as Collins puts it, starts one August day as she’s sitting outside a small motel in Colombia that served as headquarters for sampling Amazon insect life. A “sharp-stinging sensation” in her ankle prompts “a feeling of foreboding.” Sure enough, in coming days, the spot swells into a stabbing-painful, oozing “volcano shaped” lump.
When Collins gets home to the United States, she tries several home remedies, some a bit helpful. She’s slammed by work: a U.S. collecting trip, a commitment on a research project, plus she’s “deeply involved in catching up on school responsibilities.” Then while teaching, she’s hit by “pains so severe as to render speech impossible and decorum doubtful.”
She excuses herself from “a polite but wondering class” to search for an ice pack. The closest options are cans of frozen orange juice concentrate, which at least let her set up a movie to show her class while she waits for the end. After phoning experts and checking her parasitology references, she goes to an emergency room. A doctor cuts into the inflamed tissue and finds — nothing.
In the end Collins solved the problem herself. She coated the area with thick ointment, and the larva wriggled up to the skin surface. Nabbing it with forceps didn’t work, so “I squeezed and squeezed and SQUEEZED until out it popped!” she wrote. She then preserved the larva as a scientific specimen.
Fieldwork is a mix of wonder and alarm in Ware’s stories as well. On a recent expedition in Guyana, Ware and her students got a strong reminder of the need for vigilance: a big caiman swimming fast upstream. In another instance, students collecting insects at night heard a jaguarish growl off in the dark. Still dengue-carrying mosquitoes, no bigger than dandelion fluff, might have been the scariest.
Ware never met Collins, who passed away in 1996 on a research trip to the Cayman Islands. The last time Herbert Jr. saw her alive was at an airport near Washington, D.C., where she’d collected an insect she found interesting in an airport ladies’ room.
Collins’ breakthrough into the largely male club of field biologists, her overpacked years as a single parent, along with her competition for funds amid entrenched sexism and overt racism, make the “termite lady,” as she came to be called, an inspiring figure today. Her portrait hangs in Ware’s office.
