Bugs' life is passion for retired UMES professor
Rachael Pacella
rpacella@dmg.gannett.com
For a woman who once ate bugs and weeds while sleeping in a cemetery to stay alive, Jeurel Singleton has gone far in life.
Fifty years later, standing in a classroom at the Salisbury Zoo, Singleton talks fast when she's talking about the creatures featured in her chosen field, entomology, the study of insects.
She doesn't just love the tiny crawlers, fliers and squirmers, she gushes about them, poring over her 40-year-old collection with the energy and enthusiasm of a grade-school student.
But Singleton isn't a grade-school student, she's a retired University of Maryland Eastern Shore professor. And in her retirement, she has continued her lifelong passion of entomology and started passing it along to others.
She laid out her insect collection Nov. 24, each bug carefully pinned in place inside glass cases. She went over to the flying insects first, looking at white Isabella Tiger moths, which are the final phase in the life of wooly bear caterpillars. Then she turned her attention to some other moths and started talking about their pupal, or caterpillar, stages.
"Butterflies are usually not fuzzy. Only the moths get the fuzzy-wuzzy ones, and the funky looking ones, and real weird looking things," she said.
She pointed a finger at the common Comma butterfly, which actually does have a funky-looking pupal stage, with a bright white spot on its back and spikes all over.
"They look really vicious, but they're not really," she said.
Then she pointed to the beetle section of her collection, singling out a 2-inch greenish-gray bug with a horn and freckles on its back.
"Where do you think this comes from?" she asked. "Right here on Delmarva-land. The Rhinoceros beetle. This is ours, this is right here on the Shore."
When Singleton left Arkansas to attend college in North Dakota in1965, she promised herself she would learn the name of every creature and plant on Earth.
"I'm almost there, because I can go anywhere in the world and put bugs into their groupings," she said.
And things were difficult for Singleton at first – on her trip up to college she didn't eat or drink for three days, she said, because she couldn't use the restroom because of segregation.
"If you didn't see a sign for coloreds and whites, you didn't get off the bus," she said.
She got to North Dakota in July, long before dorms opened in September, so she didn't have a place to stay. So she camped out in a graveyard, eating dandelions and crickets for sustenance, boiled in a tin can, she said.
After about two weeks, a dorm mother invited her to come live in a dorm. She was malnourished, her hair was red and falling out, she said, but that first semester she would learn about ants and begin a career in entomology.
Those are some of the memories she told in a book released by the Entomological Society of America this fall, "Memoirs of Black Entomologists."
One of the goals of the book is to encourage black students to pursue careers in science, according to the society. For Singleton, the interest in entomology started while she was very young, growing up on a farm in Arkansas.
"We were very, very poor, and we didn't have a fancy house and all that. My dad had built a house, but there were holes and all in the floor," she said. "I used to watch the ants come in and out."
By watching them closely, even as a child, Singleton could tell they were communicating with each other, she said. One day her mother caught her with her head against the floor trying to get into the ant hole with the ants.
"I was crying because they didn't see me, they didn't hear me," she said.
There are, of course, plenty of insects to watch on a farm. When she was older she left the farm and went to University of North Dakota on a scholarship.
"I got introduced to so many things in college that I didn't know before," she said. "My parents were not college kids, they didn't go to high school. But they encouraged us to go, go as far as you can go. Nobody ever told me you could go all the way beyond a Ph.D. to a post-doc."
Which is what Singleton did.
Now that she is retired, she is volunteering in the Salisbury Zoo's herb garden, in addition to going to local schools and day cares to teach programs about entomology. She is continuing to learn.
"I learn so much, and a lot of the ladies learn from me, because I was showing them all of the edible weeds out there," she said. "And of course I was picking them for the pot."
On Twitter @rachaelpacella