Elwood Zimmerman

Elwood Curtin Zimmerman (born in Spokane, Washington on December 8, 1912; died in Tura Beach, New South Wales on June 18, 2004) was an American entomologist best known for his two multivolume series: Insects of Hawaii published by the University of Hawaiʻi Press and Australian Weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) published by Australia's CSIRO.

During his school years in the hills above Oakland, California, where his father was a woodworker, he developed such a passion for entomology that he acquired the nickname "Bugs." He would go on summer camping trips organized by the Boy Scout leader "Bugsy" Cain, and developed a circle of boyhood friends who went on to become entomologists, including Robert L. Usinger, J. Linsley Gressitt, and E. Gorton Linsley. At first he collected butterflies, but began to concentrate on weevils at the suggestion of a professor at the nearby University of California, Berkeley. During a camping trip in 1930, he discovered a new species of weevil that became the subject of his first academic publication, in 1932, soon after enrolling in UC Berkeley, where he received a B.S. degree in 1936.

On the basis of his considerable field experience and his earlier work mounting specimens of Hawaiian and Pacific insects for the Pacific Entomological Survey, which was then headquartered at UC Berkeley, his mentors there recommended him to serve as the field entomologist on the Bernice P. Bishop Museum's Mangarevan Expedition to southeastern Polynesia in 1934. His senior colleagues on that expedition gave him a new, lifelong nickname, "Zimmie," and his close-up encounters with a wide variety of island ecosystems gave him a new, enduring passion for biogeography.

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