Everything about William Morton Wheeler totally explained
William Morton Wheeler, Ph. D. (
March 19,
1865 -
April 19 1937) was an
American entomologist,
myrmecologist and
Harvard Professor.
Early life
Born as the son of Julius Morton and Caroline Georgiana Wheeler (
née Anderson) in
Milwaukee, he was transferred from public school to a local
German academy due to, in his own words, "persistently bad behavior". They had a small museum which Wheeler had studied since he was a child, and when
Ward's Natural Science Establishment in early 1884 brought a collection of stuffed and skeletonized animals to the academy, to persuade the city fathers to purchase them, Wheeler volunteered to spend the nights in helping
Ward to unpack and install the specimens. The latter was so impressed that he offered Wheeler a job in his
Rochester, New York establishment. Here he identified birds and mammals, and later collections of shells, echinoderms and sponges. His shell catalogue was still in use by collectors in the late 1920s.
Training
Wheeler was trained as an
insect embryologist, having studied under
Baur,
Dohrn and
Whitman, but became the leading authority on behaviour of
social insects, achieving particular renown for his studies of
social behaviour of
ants. He was instrumental in the development of
ethology and first popularized the term in a
1902 paper in
Science.
Legacy
He was a
taxonomist of the highest order, and was responsible for the descriptions of innumerable
species, among them
Pogonomyrmex maricopa, the most venomous insect in the world. Professor Wheeler was curator of
invertebrate zoology in the
American Museum of Natural History, New York, from
1903 to
1908. He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences.
A close contact of the
British myrmecologist and
coleopterist Horace Donisthorpe, it was to Wheeler that Donisthorpe dedicated his in
1915. Donisthorpe and Wheeler also frequently exchanged specimens, leading the latter to first develop the idea that the
Formicinae subfamily had its origins in North America.
His work includes 467 titles.
Footnotes
Further Information
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