Charles Lee Remington, the Yale University entomologist who knew everything there is to know about butterflies and moths and used his studies of lepidoptera to provide crucial insights into the process of evolution, died May 31 in Hamden, Conn. He was 85.
No cause of death was given by the family.
He became a media favorite in the summer of 1996 when he appeared widely on U.S. and international television networks to extol the glories -- and the taste -- of genus \o7Magicicada\f7, the 17-year locust, which had emerged that summer.
Witty and entertaining, and wearing his trademark bolo tie, Remington used the occasion to educate network audiences about the exotic cicadas, throwing in a dollop of information about other species in the process and no doubt setting many youngsters on the path of bug collecting as a hobby, if not a professional passion.
He also demonstrated what he considered the distinctive tastiness of the cicadas, consuming them boiled and fried on camera to the delight and repulsion of newscasters.
"You know the slight sweetness that is in good, young venison?" he said at the time. "Well, that's what the 17-year cicada tastes like."
But the media sideshow was a minor distraction compared with his long-term interest in studying isolated populations of insects and other species and understanding how that isolation contributed to the development of new species.
Remington developed what was known as the "biological species concept," maintaining that a significant proportion of evolution occurred through hybridization among close relatives in these isolated areas, which he called suture zones.
The idea was quickly dismissed by evolutionary biologists but has recently come back into vogue as researchers have continued to explore the evolutionary process.
Remington's expertise with insects was not limited to butterflies and moths -- the biological order Lepidoptera.
"A lot of entomologists know enough about all insects to identify them, but the young guys tend to specialize," evolutionary biologist Rob DeSalle of the American Museum of Natural History said in 1996. "Charlie is cut in the mold of the gentleman naturalist. He can talk very knowledgeably about all of them."
Remington, born in Reedville, Va., on Jan. 19, 1922, grew up in St. Louis, where his father was a prep school teacher with a strong interest in butterflies. Remington soon adopted his father's passion and carried it into his studies at Principia College in Elsah, Ill.
