Carl Frederick William Muesebeck (24 September 1894 - 13 November 1987) was an American entomologist who specialized in the

Hymenoptera Hymenoptera is a large order of insects, comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants. Over 150,000 living species of Hymenoptera have been described, in addition to over 2,000 extinct ones. Many of the species are parasitic. Females typi ...

. He worked at the insect identification division of the

US Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an executive department of the United States federal government that aims to meet the needs of commercial farming and livestock food production, promotes agricultural trade and producti ...

and was also a research associate at the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

. Muesebeck was born in

Medina, New York Medina is a Administrative divisions of New York#Village, village in the Towns of Shelby, New York, Shelby and Ridgeway, New York, Ridgeway in Orleans County, New York, Orleans County, New York (state), New York, United States. It is located app ...

where his parents William and Marie Koch had moved to in the 1880s. His father who worked as a tailor came from

Stettin Szczecin ( , , ; ; ; or ) is the capital and largest city of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in northwestern Poland. Located near the Baltic Sea and the German border, it is a major seaport, the largest city of northwestern Poland, and se ...

, Pomerania (the family name has variants that include Meusebach) and his mother was from Angermunde, east of Berlin. They had married in the United States. Muesebeck went to school in Medina and at Brockport High School, while also helping his father at his tailoring business. He joined Cornell University in 1912 and took an interest in mathematics and English. His interest in insects was sparked by studies under John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock. Graduating with an interest in biology and entomology he joined the US department of agriculture in 1916 studying gypsy and brown-tail moths in his early years. He resigned work in 1918 to join Cornell for doctoral studies. His thesis was on the North American '' Apanteles'' and after receiving his doctorate, he rejoined the USDA in 1919. He worked briefly in Hungary in 1926-1928 during which time he travelled around Europe. Muesebeck wrote numerous taxonomic revisions on hymenoptera. Another influential work was his catalogue of ''Common names of insects approved by the American association of economic entomologists'' (1946). For his 75th birthday the flea specialist Robert Traub named a genus ''Muesebeckella'' after him while Harry Hoogstraal described a tick ''Ornithodoros (Alectorobius) muesebecki'' from an

masked booby The masked booby (''Sula dactylatra''), also called the masked gannet or the blue-faced booby, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae. First described by the French naturalist René-Primevère Lesson in 1831, the masked boob ...

to which he gave the common name "Musebeck's Arabian Booby Argasid." Karl Krombein dedicated a genus of cuckoo wasp ''Muesebeckidium''. Muesebeck retired in 1954. He took part in baseball and bowling, and was a long-distance runner. He married Ida C. Praedel in 1917. They had a son who died at the age of 16 from a brain tumour in 1935. Ida died in 1975. He married Luella M. Walkley, a hymenopterist colleague, in 1980 but she died in 1981. He then lived with his cousin Elfrieda Geissler.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Muesebeck, Carl American entomologists 1894 births 1987 deaths People from Medina, New York 20th-century American zoologists