Darren Pollock

Darren A. Pollock is a Canadian-American entomologist and professor of biology at Eastern New Mexico University, known for his taxonomic work on beetles, particularly the superfamily Tenebrionoidea.

Background

Pollock studied at the University of Manitoba and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1994. After postdoctoral work on beetle systematics and a stint studying fire ecology on the tallgrass prairie, he eventually settled at Eastern New Mexico University, where he now curates the invertebrate collection at the university's natural history museum.

Research

Much of Pollock's career has gone into untangling the classification of obscure beetle families — Mycteridae, Pythidae, Pyrochroidae, Boridae, Melandryidae, Salpingidae, and their relatives — work that rarely makes headlines but quietly fills in the map of an enormous, under-studied group of insects. In a 2012 interview about a newly identified Wisconsin species, Mycterus youngi, he described a long-standing attachment to what he called "orphan beetles" — small, economically unremarkable species that "fall through the cracks" of funding and attention precisely because they don't bite, sting, or damage crops. "I just want to keep adding to the list of things we didn't know," he said.

One contribution stands out for its strangeness rather than its obscurity: a 2002 study, co-written with Benjamin Normark, on Micromalthus debilis, the telephone-pole beetle. It is the only living member of its family, and its larvae reproduce almost entirely by giving birth to more larvae without ever mating — one of the strangest life cycles known in insects. Pollock and Normark's paper remains a key reference on how that life cycle was pieced together and what it means for beetle evolution.

He also discovered the Australian beetle genus Binburrum in 1995, and in 2020, working with then-doctoral student Yun Hsiao, described three new species in the genus.