W.  V. King Reprint Collection

           Legendary mosquito taxonomist Dr. Willard Van Orsdel King is being honored in the form of a contribution of his scientific articles to the PHEREC library.  The reprint collection of more than 60 research articles has been indexed and the list is available at the PHEREC Web site.  In addition to the reprints, historic photographs and other memorabilia have been kindly provided to PHEREC by one of Dr. King’s daughters, Mrs. Caroline Groshart.  Much of Dr. King’s professional life was spent in Florida and it is appropriate that Florida A&M University has been chosen to honor Dr. King.

          Dr. King was born in Virginia City, Montana on July 19, 1888 to George Darwin King, father, and Alice Jones King, mother.  He received a B.S. Degree from Montana State College, Bozeman in 1911 and a Ph.D. from Tulane University, New Orleans in 1915.  His work with mosquitoes began while he was at Tulane, culminating with a dissertation entitled: “The Mosquitoes of New Orleans and Vicinity.”  In 1919 he published a series of papers incriminating Anopheles punctipennis as a host for malaria.  Dr. King’s life-long professional career in medical entomology started as early as 1909 as an “Agent and Expert” to study distribution of the Rocky Mountain spotted fever tick in the northwestern states.  Dr. King counted among his accomplishments pioneering studies that have had a lasting impact on medical entomology.  These include studies in the biology of the tick carrying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF) in the Bitter Root Valley of Montana (1910-1911), for which he developed a control program by dipping cattle, pasture rotation, and the poisoning of rodent reservoirs (1911).

         His mosquito-related research began in 1912 at Tulane University.  He became a USDA entomologist in 1915, investigating malaria transmission by mosquitoes.  In 1917, he moved to Mound, Louisiana, where he made the U. S. Bureau of Entomology his headquarters for the next 13 years.  While in Mound, he became the first person to use aerial spraying as a method of controlling mosquitoes.

           Dr. King moved to Orlando, Florida in 1930, and in 1931, Orlando became the headquarters of the mosquito activities of the U. S. Bureau of Entomology.   Dr. King was Director of that bureau and an entomology consultant on the Florida Board of Health.  His projects had to do principally with the development of new materials and methods for protecting humans against mosquitoes and other pests.  He made several surveys of Fort Lauderdale in the early 1940’s, and his expert advice helped make all of Florida safer from insect-borne disease.  In 1941, he was commissioned a colonel in the U. S. Army Sanitary Corps, where he carried on mosquito-control activities in the South Pacific until 1946.   During World War II, he served as a commissioned officer in the Sanitary Corps of the U.S. Army in the grades of Major to Colonel (1941-1946).  After the war, he returned to the USDA and was stationed in Orlando, Florida where he was in charge of the laboratory of the Division of Insects Affecting Man and Animals until his retirement in 1953.

           Some, but not all, of his remarkable accomplishments include: incrimination of Anopheles punctipennis and An. crucians as malaria vectors and studies on the development of malaria parasites in these species and in An. quadrimaculatus (1915-1920); identification of the blood meal of mosquitoes using the precipitin test to determine their normal hosts (1920-1928); discovering and naming a number of new species of Anopheles in the Philippines (1930-1932); extensive studies on the distribution of mosquitoes in the southeast with particular reference to disease vectors and pest species (1932-1941); discovering and naming more than 50 new mosquito species, and obtaining new distributional and breeding records (1941-1946); studies on the kinds, distribution and abundance of the biting flies (mosquitoes, black flies and dog flies), their breeding habitats, the effectiveness of repellents, and effectiveness of different insecticides against the larvae and adults (1946-1951); publication of  “A Handbook of the Mosquitoes of the Southeastern United States” (1960).

           Upon his retirement in 1953, Dr. King moved to the W. V. King House in the Harbor Beach subdivision of Fort Lauderdale, where Dr. King continued to act as a consultant on mosquito control to the U. S. Bureau on Entomology.  He died at his home on March 21, 1970.

 [This news item is based on an article written by Dr. Hyun-Woo Park]

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