Fernando López Tuero
Puerto Rican scientist
Fernando López Tuero (1857–1907) was a Spanish agronomist who worked for several years in Puerto Rico during the final decade of Spanish colonial rule. He is best known for identifying the white grub, larvae of scarab beetles of the genus Phyllophaga, as the cause of the 1890s sugarcane epidemic on the island. His work is regarded as one of the earliest scientific contributions to agricultural research in Puerto Rico.
Life and career
Fernando López Tuero was born in Murcia on 8 September 1857 and completed his studies in agricultural engineering in 1888. Shortly afterward he was appointed director of the Agronomic Station of Río Piedras in Puerto Rico, where the colonial government sought to modernize agricultural production through systematic scientific research. During the 1890s he worked on crop diseases, soil management and the modernization of tropical agriculture. When the station closed, he returned to Spain and took part in several agricultural development projects in Seville, La Rioja and Murcia. Between 1890 and 1897 he published a series of essays on tropical crops and rural economy. He died in 1907 in Logroño (La Rioja).
Agricultural epidemic
In the late 19th century an epidemic was affecting the agricultural industry of Puerto Rico.
“Fernando López Tuero” enters the record as puerto Rican scientist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fernando, López and Tuero can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fernando López Tuero” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.