George Salt

George Salt (12 December 1903, Loughborough, Leicestershire – 17 February 2003, Cambridge, UK) was an English entomologist and ecologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956. Biography Born as the oldest brother of three siblings, George Salt in April 1911 moved with his family to Calgary in Alberta, Canada. When he was nine years old he began delivering newspapers after school, continued this employment through his high school years, and consistently contributed his earnings to the family income. He enjoyed outdoor activities with his two younger brothers and, when he was nine years old, began collecting the Lepidoptera of Alberta. He did his secondary school study at Calgary's Crescent Heights Collegiate Institute. George and his three siblings graduated from the University of Alberta. He paid his own university expenses by vacation work. In autumn 1924 he matriculated as a graduate student at Harvard University, where he studied under the famous entomologist William Morton Wheeler. For his doctoral dissertation George Salt investigated the parasitism by wasps belonging to the genus Stylops, specifically the effects of such parasitism on the secondary sexual characteristics, viscera, and behaviour of bees in the genus Andrena. He had two interludes during his graduate study at Harvard. After completing his first term, he worked in Cuba at the Harvard Biological Station, where he did research on sugarcane borers and ant mimicry. Two years later he was employed as an entomologist by the United Fruit Company to investigate ways of controlling the banana pests Colaspis hypochlora (a leaf beetle) and Castniomera atymnius humboldti (a moth) in Colombia. A survey of the damage caused by C. hypochlora showed that poorly drained areas were centres of the beetle infestation; study of its larval stages showed that carabao grass (Paspalum conjugatum) is an important food source for C. hypochlora. Improved drainage and carefully planned weeding resulted in partial eradication of the grass and considerable reduction in the damage caused by the beetle. He returned to England in 1928 when William R. Thompson, the director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, offered him the senior post under the directorship to do research at the institute's laboratory at Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire. The goal of the research was biocontrol of agricultural pests by using parasites of the pests.