Maria Elizabeth Smith Fernald (May 24, 1839 – October 6, 1919) was an American

entomologist Entomology () is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term "insect" was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such as arach ...

who wrote a major reference book, ''A Catalogue of the

Coccidae The Coccidae are a family of scale insects belonging to the superfamily Coccoidea. They are commonly known as soft scales, wax scales or tortoise scales. The females are flat with elongated oval bodies and a smooth integument which may be cover ...

of the World''. She was also instrumental in identifying the caterpillar form of the economically destructive European

spongy moth ''Lymantria dispar'', also known as the gypsy moth or the spongy moth, is a species of moth in the family Erebidae. ''Lymantria dispar'' is subdivided into several subspecies, with subspecies such as ''L. d. dispar'' and ''L. d. japonica'' bei ...

following its introduction into North America.

Education

Maria Elizabeth Smith was born on May 24, 1839, to Ebenezer and Betsy (Torsey) Smith of Monmouth, Maine. She attended the Maine Wesleyan Seminary and Female College, graduating in the school's first class. She stayed at the school as an instructor for a time. In 1863, she married entomologist Charles H. Fernald, whom she had tutored in music. They had a son, Henry Torsey Fernald, who also became an entomologist. Fernald became interested in entomology through her husband and began her education in the subject in the 1870s by collecting insects for him around Maine State College in Orono, where he was teaching at the time.

Career

Fernald developed into a capable and respected entomologist, an expert on the Coccidae,

Tortricidae The Tortricidae are a family of moths, commonly known as tortrix moths or leafroller moths, in the order Lepidoptera. This large family has over 11,000 species described, and is the sole member of the superfamily Tortricoidea, although the genu ...

, and

Tineidae Tineidae is a family of moths in the order Lepidoptera described by Pierre André Latreille in 1810. Collectively, they are known as fungus moths or tineid moths. The family contains considerably more than 3,000 species in more than 300 genera. ...

families of moths and one of only a handful of women in a field that would remain almost exclusively male for another century. In the late 1870s, she began a catalogue of the family Tortricidae, commonly known as tortrix moths or leafroller moths. She later expanded this to include North American insects of all kinds, and one section of this work was published as ''A Catalogue of the Coccidae of the World'' in 1903. This "gigantic piece of work" as one authority called it, enumerated more than 1500 species and served as a vital reference work in a rapidly expanding field of knowledge. It was particularly valuable to investigators researching

scale insects Scale insects are small insects of the order Hemiptera, suborder Sternorrhyncha. Of dramatically variable appearance and extreme sexual dimorphism, they comprise the infraorder Coccomorpha which is considered a more convenient grouping than the ...

, which are highly destructive to agriculture, and it was still in use as a classic text decades after Fernald's death. Around 1886, the Fernalds moved from Maine to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Charles took up a professorship at

Massachusetts Agricultural College The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

and was put in charge of the recently founded Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station. Three years later, the first of a devastating series of European gypsy moth plagues broke out—the first major outbreak since the insect's arrival in North America two decades earlier. Fernald had taken over the entomological work at the Experiment Station in Charles's absence, and thanks to her knowledge of

Lepidoptera Lepidoptera ( ) is an order (biology), order of insects that includes butterfly, butterflies and moths (both are called lepidopterans). About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera are described, in 126 Family (biology), families and 46 Taxonomic r ...

, she was able to quickly identify the caterpillars responsible for that first infestation, providing the key to subsequent control efforts. Fernald died on October 6, 1919.

References

American entomologists 1839 births 1919 deaths Women entomologists 19th-century American zoologists 20th-century American zoologists Kents Hill School alumni {{Authority control