Global Ant Project -- World Ant Taxonomists

Mary Talbot (1903-1990)

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

U. S. zoologist and entomologist. Born 30 November 1903 in Columbus, Ohio, to Paulena (Smitz) and Paul Threser Talbot. Educated Denison University (B.S., 1925), Ohio State University (M.A., 1927); University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1934). Professional experience: University of Omaha, instructor (1927-1928); Stephens College, Columbia, Mo., instructor (1928-1930); Mundelein College, Chicago (1935-1936); Lindenwood College, St. Charles Mo., Department of Biology, assistant professor through professor (1936-after 1968), departmental chair, Honors and memberships; L'Union Internationale pour l'Etude des Insectes Sociaux, Kansas Entomological Society, American Institute for Biological Research.
Talbot published articles on social insects, especially ants, their daily behavior, their nuptial flights, population fluctuations, and particularly, the biology of slave-making ants.
A database for the Talbot collections is housed at NCSU. For each specimen, we have entered all of the data on each label (e.g., locality and determination) in each vial. We have data from 3,965 individual vials in the database. Jessie Allen and Mike Weiser are developing scripts which will pull the data from the labels and generate an atomized database by collection locality, date, species determination, etc. While preliminary, the earliest preserved collections appear to be from 1924 and the latest from 1978 (with a peak of collections in 1953). The majority of the collections come from Michigan, and the single most collected site is the E.S. George Reserve, a field station run by the University of Michigan near Pinckney, MI.
Lindenwood University (then,Lindenwood College), St. Charles, Missouri.

Mary Talbot died April 16, 1990. She taught at Lindenwood between 1936 and 1968.

ANT TAXONOMY

TAXONOMIC PUBLICATIONS

Kennedy, C. H.; Talbot, M. 1939.  Notes on the hypogaeic ant, Proceratium silaceum Roger. Proc. Indiana Acad. Sci. 48: 202-210

Talbot, M. 1968. Slave-raids of the ant Polyergus lucidus Mayr. Psyche 74 (1967): 299-313. [12.vi.1968.]

Talbot, M. 1976b [1975].  A list of the ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) of the Edwin S. George Reserve, Livingston County, Michigan. Great Lakes Entomol. 8: 245-246

Talbot, M. 1977. The natural history of the workerless ant parasite, Formica talbotae. Psyche 83 (1976): 282-288. [29.viii.1977.]

Talbot, M. & Kennedy, C.H. 1940. The slave-making ant, Formica sanguinea subintegra Emery, its raids, nuptual flights and nest structure. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 33: 560-577. [30.ix.1940.]

REFERENCE

Wilson, E.O. 1990. Myrmecological Newsletter 5:3-4.

Bolton B, Alpert G, Ward PS, Naskrecki P. 2007. [CD-ROM] Bolton’s Catalogue of the Ants of the World. Harvard University Press.