Roy Snelling, entomologist with a specialty in ants; 73
LOS ANGELES - Roy Snelling, an internationally renowned entomologist who turned his boyhood fascination with insects into a lifelong study of the secret world of ants, wasps, and bees, has died. He was 73.
Mr. Snelling died in his sleep April 21 after apparently suffering a heart attack while in Kenya conducting a field study of rare ants and bees.
The world Mr. Snelling dedicated his life to understanding is one that most people know only vaguely.
During his 30-year career at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Mr. Snelling became a leading expert in all things hymenoptera. He amassed a premier research collection of ants, his specialty.
Where the lay person sees a trail of black ants crawling up a kitchen wall - wholly unremarkable - Mr. Snelling saw a sliver of a huge, diverse kingdom. Ants are mostly beneficial, but some ants destroy crops, some damage wood by tunneling and nesting in it, and some ravage other species of ants.
For all their abundance, and our proximity to them, "we know very little about the ant," Mr. Snelling said in a 1965 Los Angeles Times article. "Scientists have been studying ants for only 100 years."
So Mr. Snelling traveled the world looking under rocks, setting out chicken scraps as bait and sometimes climbing to the tops of mountains while searching for ant colonies. His studies are the primary reference for the honeypot ants of North America, groups of carpenter ants and the ant life of Chile.
