Richard M. Bohart

Dr. Richard Mitchell Bohart (September 28, 1913 – February 1, 2007) was an American entomologist, university professor, and a member of the University of California, Davis Department of Entomology for more than 50 years. He became well known for the courses he taught in general entomology, insect systematics, and summer field courses in insect identification. From 1963 to 1967 he served as chair of the Department of Entomology for the University of California at Davis.

In 1946 the Department of Entomology established a research oriented insect collection and Richard Bohart contributed research material in the Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Strepsiptera. Bohart’s interests in aculeate wasps resulted in one of the most comprehensive collections in the world. His contributions to the Department of Entomology led to the dedication of on campus Bohart Museum of Entomology, named after him in 1986.

Early life
Richard M. Bohart was born in Palo Alto, California in 1913. Bohart, at an early age, had an artistic interest. At the age of 8 he and his brother George E. Bohart went door to door when they lived in Washington, D.C. selling clay dishes Richard Bohart made from clay found and dug up from the front street of their residence. Sculpting of clay figurines remained as an interest for many years into his high school and college years. Richard Bohart made clay models for his own concepts of futuristic automobiles, of animals found in San Francisco’s Fleischacker Zoo, of his brother’s head, and of female figures in magazines. Many of these artistic works made from clay were never fired but some still remain intact in his home.

During Bohart’s high school years he and his brother George E. Bohart competed in distance throwing a football. This led to Bohart to compete in his high school annual football team kick and throw contest. Bohart won the throwing event two years in a row against the star players.

Richard Bohart’s early scientific endeavors involved experiments which flooded his home basement and anaesthetizing his cat with illuminating gas. The cat is reported by Richard Bohart’s brother to have survived both the flooding and the anaesthetizing. Paleontology was another of Bohart’s scientific interests as a youth. As a college freshman at University of California, Berkeley working at a duck hunting club on Point Reyes, Bohart found dozens of Miocene marine fossils on a stretch of beach. He brought back numerous cetacean ear bones and several dolphin skulls described as Echinorhynchodelphus pontereyensis by a professor of the Paleontology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Research History
Bohart’s experiences in butterfly collecting transitioned to a more scientific endeavor after making an insect collection to satisfy requirements for a University of California, Berkeley field course in entomology. He found a bee (Andrena) which had a sack-like parasite protruding from its abdomen which was identified by Dr. E. C. VanDyke as a female Stylops (order Strepsiptera). This interested Bohart enough to a point where he continued to study Strepsiptera and eventually made them the subject of his Ph.D. thesis in 1938.

After he was married, in 1939 and moved to West Los Angeles, Bohart was doing research and teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. There Bohart was researching the sod webworm that was infesting his own front yard lawn from 1938 to 1941.

In November 1942 Bohart was drafted into the US Army then transferred into the US Navy Medical Corps as an Ensign. At the Marine base, Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, Bohart taught malaria and mosquito control. Bohart did the same at Marine base, Camp Perry in Williamsburg, Virginia. In the spring of 1944 Bohart was transferred to Washington, D.C. and assigned to Naval Medical Research Unit #2 housed at the National Academy of Sciences. Almost immediately Bohart was sent to Orlando and Tallahassee, Florida to study mosquitoes for a month. In the fall of 1944 Bohart was assigned abroad to Guam then Okinawa for the purposes of malaria control. In the fall of 1945 Bohart remained in the Navy to complete his research on mosquitoes. In the spring of 1946 Bohart was released from the Navy with the rank of Lt. Commander and returned to the University of California, Los Angeles. He later transferred from the University of California, Los Angeles to the University of California, Davis campus in 1946.

The number of journal article publications authored by Richard Bohart total over 200 over his research career.

University of California, Davis Career
Richard Bohart transferred to the University of California at Davis from the University of California campus in Los Angeles in 1946. As the Davis campus began to declare administrative independence from the campus at Berkeley the departments of entomology at both campuses became independently governed. Bohart became vice chairman of the Davis campus Department of Entomology in 1957. From 1963 to 1967 Bohart served as chair for the Department of Entomology at UC Davis.

During the time Bohart spent at the University of California, Davis he contributed in building the university’s insect collection. In the late 1940s the insect collection used for study and research at UC Davis had a limited number of specimens available. The university’s commitment to establish a research oriented collection in 1946 demanded the collection to expand. Bohart contributed insects in the orders of Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Strepsiptera. His interest in aculeate wasps contributed to how comprehensive the collection has grown to in current day. Today the collection is integrated into the university’s Bohart Museum of Entomology and is the seventh largest insect collection in North America.