1867-1923 Charles Henry Turner, Zoologist

First African American to receive a PhD from University of Chicago, (1907, Zoology)

"Charles Henry Turner was one of the earliest Black Americans to earn a doctorate in the Biological Sciences (Alfred O. Coffin had earned one at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1889). Turner's doctoral thesis, a study of the "homing" instince in ants, marked a watershed in scientific research. Earlier, his work had followed classic morphological lines - that is, examination of an organism's form and structure by means of a microscopic observation in the laboratory. Following his time at Chicago, his work became more behavioral, focusing on animals in the field, in their natural habitat. …. He was the first to fully describe a unique movement - a pattern of gyration - that certain species of ant go through when returning to their nests. This movement came to be widely known, in the scientific literature, at "Turner's Circling." Turner also showed that ant movement is influenced by landmarks and light, that bees respond to color and pattern as well as odor, that wasps and burrowing bees may memorize landmarks adjacent to their nests, that ant lions lie motionless for prolonged periods out of an involuntary response to external stimuli ("terror paralysis") rather than as a self-concealment or camouflage reflex, that certain insects can hear and distinguish pitch, and that cockroaches learn by trial and error (but forget quickly). The innovative experimental techniques and ingenious devices that Turner developed to carry out his work were admired and often emulated by other scientists. Original Source "African American Lives" ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Resarch, Harvard University, in association with the American Council of Learned Societies. Oxford University Press, 2004

(xHistory xPOC xBlack xAfricanAmerican xUSA xZoologist xInvertebrate xBehavior xSpecies)