Jane Wright

Jane Wright was born in Ontario in 1954. Her father, mother and grandmother were all educated at Queens University where they received their bachelor’s degrees. Wright’s father was a successful steel businessman and her mother was the president of many volunteer organizations. Wright is the oldest of three children with a sister and a youngest a brother. Wright’s parents strongly encouraged all their children to pursue a university education but discouraged her from studying a field like engineering, which she found interesting, because they felt it was still a male chauvinist profession.

In junior high Wright had still not discovered the field of entomology. She chose studying math and sciences over popularity. Of particular interest to her was biology and cell research.

Wright chose Queens University in Kingston, Ontario because it was the university that other members of her family had graduated from. Wright wanted to study in the biology department but was not sure she would be accepted so she applied and was accepted into the math department. Wright went on to combine computing science with biology to do population research. The university developed a program for her combining computing research and biology but by that time she was focused only on biology and majored in it.

At Queens university during her 3rd year she took her first entomology course and that is when her interest began. It was the only entomology course offered at the university at the time. For her senior year honors research project she studied cutworms at a tobacco research station in Ontario. At the research station she emptied a light trap counting the number and type of moths and mounted them with spread wings. From that point her interest in entomology grew.

Wrights interest in entomology led her to the University of Guelph, Southern Ontario, the only university in Canada with an entomology department. At the University of Guelph, working on her master’s degree Wright decided to study apple maggots but professor John Laing persuaded her to study ladybird beetles instead as not as much research had been done on them. Wright did much field work studying ladybird beetles, determining the conditions during the winter that made them most likely to survive. The conditions for research were difficult involving carrying packs of tools, traps and specimens through areas without roads. She dug traps of specimens out of frozen ground to recover them.

After graduating from the University of Guelph, still with a strong interest in entomology Wright enrolled at Berkeley, California in the United States. At the time, no university in Canada offered a PhD program in entomology. At Berkley professor Carl Huffaker phased back his retirement to help Wright find a project to work on for her PhD. Wright began studying blue-green aphids but found that there was little research that had not already been done. Wright switched to studying parasitic wasps in quarantine. She found that wasps chose their host scale insects in which to lay their eggs based on their size. If the wasp eggs were female they were most likely to survive in a larger host while male eggs were able to survive and develop in smaller hosts.

During her final year at Berkeley Wright began looking for work. She came across an ad in Nature magazine from CSIRO-Australia needing an entomologist to go to Africa and continue research into dung beetles. The buffalo fly in both Africa and Australia is a pest to livestock, taking up to 20 blood-meals a day causing bleeding ulcerations. CSIRO-Australia was seeking a parasitic insect that could be imported from Africa to Australia to control the buffalo fly population. Dung beetles feed on the larvae of buffalo flies as they develop in animal dung and had already been identified as a possibility for controlling the buffalo fly’s population when Wright joined the CSIRO-Australia research team in Africa. There are over 250 species of dung beetles that feed on buffalo fly and use their bodies as parasitic hosts; identifying which species would best serve the purpose was the research that Wright continued.

In researching the different beetles that grew in animal dung wright came across species that had not yet been named. Wright corresponded with a specialists of predator/parasite beetles that was doing a revision of known information on them. One of the species that wright collected taxonomic information on was new. The specialists named this new small African species of beetle Aleochara wrightii after Wright.

The CSIRO-Australia led dung beetle research in Africa went on for almost 20 years and Wright contributed to that research for more than two years. Those funding the research decided to change their priorities and Wright and her group were forced to pack up their research camp in Africa. Wright salvaged her research once back in Brisbane Australia and distributed imported dung beetles to Australia. They are making a positive impact on keeping the harmful population of buffalo flies under control today.

Wright next found work again with CSIRO-Australia in their Division of Entomology as an insect ecologist/behaviorists in Canberra, Australia. She researched stored grain beetles and how they cause harm to grain kept in Silos. She adapted technology and methods used in different parts of the world with different climates to those in Australia. Wright worked for CSIRO Division of Entomology in combination with the Stored Grain Research Laboratory to detect infestation of grain beetles in silos early on before they cause significant damage.

Wright met David Rees, an ecologist doing similar work to her own in other parts of the world at a workshop during a conference on insects in stored grain in Vancouver, Canada. She met Rees again 18 months later in Texas, USA and again at a conference in Bordeaux, France. As Wright continued to work in Australia, she and Rees corresponded via letters as he worked in stored grain problems in Mexico, West Africa, and Indonesia. Wright and Rees were married in the UK. Rees was hired by the Stored Grain Laboratory and moved to Australia with Wright.

Wright then began work for the Stored Grain Research Laboratory in Australia to control the warehouse beetle and its harmful impact on stored grains and stored grain commodities. The warehouse beetle is not indigenous to Australia and originally an attempt was made to eradicate them. Wright worked with other researchers to find that the warehouse beetle had spread from plants and silos with stored grain into the wild across Australia and that complete eradication was impossible. Wright and her team found the most effective amounts of heat and fumigants used in grain to control the warehouse beetle.

Wright became the deputy head of the Stored Grain Research Laboratory which is a management position. She did take courses on management and oversees the work and financial aspects of the company and other scientists.

Wright was asked if she saw any discrimination in the workplace as a female scientist. She said that she encountered remarkably little, but during a time that she was applying for work during her final year at Berkeley a person at a conference told her that “a woman who had studied in California would never ever want to go to a remote part of Canada and work on insects in the forest.” Wright did not get an interview for the job the man was referring to. A year later at the same conference Wright derived “enormous satisfaction” by telling the same person about the job that she had taken working for CSIRO with dung beetles “in African game parks, and dodging lions and American Buffalo.”