Beverly Gerdeman PhD

Beverly Gerdeman has been an entomologist since 2002. She has worked in Indonesia, the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. While her primary focus has been on helping farmers manage agricultural pests, she began her career researching a rarely collected family of mites that hitch rides on millipedes and centipedes, the Heterozerconidae. Chasing them through tropical jungles, she inevitably crossed paths with army ants and became captivated with hunting rare myrmecophiles! Many hours were spent trying to find the beginning or end of ant trails or searching for their nests. Her skin would prickle from formic acid the ants would spray as she chased them for a close-up glimpse of the insects and mites that accompanied them. She soon found ants were everywhere, from huge colonies of aggressive, arboreal ants with snapping their jaws, to colonies contentedly living within rusty hulls of ferries transporting passengers and goods from island to island. It doesn't take a remote or even a tropical location to find ants. No matter where you live, it's likely you don't have to go far to spy a few ants and make your own discoveries! Now retired, Bev shares her life with her little rascal terrier, Gertie and loves to spend time with her daughters and grandsons and of course chases ants!