Marston Bates was an American zoologist. Bates' studies on mosquitoes contributed to the understanding of the epidemiology of yellow fever in northern South America.
Born in Michigan, Bates received a BS from the University of Florida in 1927. He received an AM in 1933 and a PhD in 1934, both from Harvard University. He lived for many years in Villavicencio between the mountains and the llanos in central Colombia. From 1952 until 1971 he was a professor at the University of Michigan. He was a Fellow of the Entomological Society of America in 1940 and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. He was the author of many popular science books. He was married to Nancy Bell Fairchild, daughter of the botanist David Fairchild and granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell.
In 1960, he published the ecological science book The Forest and the Sea, an introduction to how ecosystems work.
He compares a rain forest and a tropical sea, their similarities and differences, and through it demonstrates how to understand biological systems.
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“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”
The Nature of Natural History (1950)
