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.
Snelling died in his sleep April 21, apparently after suffering a heart attack while in Kenya conducting a field study of rare ants and bees.
The world Snelling dedicated his life to understanding is one that most people know only vaguely, and then only as an annoyance: a buzzing, stinging, crawling menace to picnics and backyard barbecues.
During his 30-year career at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County -- the last six as collections manager -- Snelling became a leading expert in all things hymenoptera. He amassed a premier research collection of ants, his specialty.
Where the layperson sees a trail of black ants crawling up a kitchen wall -- wholly unremarkable -- Snelling saw a sliver of a huge, diverse kingdom. Ants are mostly beneficial, but there are ants that destroy crops, ants that damage wood by tunneling and nesting in it, ants that ravage other species of ants.
In Southern California the ant on the wall probably is an Argentine ant, which is not native but has taken up residence and invaded many a home.
For all their abundance, and our proximity to them, "we know very little about the ant," Snelling said in a 1965 Times article. "Scientists have been studying ants for only 100 years."
So 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.
In 1965, when he was 30 and one of only 10 myrmecologists in the world, Snelling followed a hunch and for two years searched for a colony of Nobomessor cockerellis. The shiny, black, slender, termite-eating ant had not been seen in California before. Snelling found the colony on a desert peak 50 miles southwest of Needles and observed it for 44 hours.
Lying on his stomach watching and sometimes listening -- a few species make noises by snapping their jaws or rubbing their legs together -- Snelling understood the lives of ants: how they relate to one another, how they interact with the environment, their social order.
