Bates, Marston

Marston Bates, (born July 23, 1906, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.—died April 3, 1974, Ann Arbor, Mich.), American zoologist whose studies of mosquitoes in the 1930s and ’40s contributed greatly to the epidemiology of yellow fever in northern South America.

After several years of fieldwork, Bates received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1934. From 1937 to 1952 he served on the staff of the International Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and in 1952 joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His early publications were largely entomological (e.g., The Butterflies of Cuba [1934] and The Natural History of Mosquitoes [1949]), but his later books were more ecological; they included The Nature of Natural History (1950) and The Forest and the Sea (1960).