Richard William Ethelbert Tucker, entomologist, was the son of Charles John Tucker and his wife Clara Elizabeth. He was appointed as assistant in arachnology in
the Department of Entomology of the South African Museum, Cape Town, in 1914. During
the next seven years he collected arachnids (scorpions, spiders, mites, ticks,
etc.) and insects very widely in the Cape Province, Transvaal, Namibia,
Botswana and Zimbabwe. Among others he contributed ants from Namibia, the
Transvaal, Zimbabwe and the Cape Province to the museum's collections. He also rearranged
the whole arachnid collection and published several papers: 'On some South
African Aviculariidae (Arachnida)' (1917), 'On some new South African spiders
of the families Barychelidae, Dipluridae, Eresidae, Zodariidae, Heracliidae,
Urocteidae, Clubionidae' (1920) and 'The Drassidae of South Africa (Arachnida)'
(1923) in the Annals of the South African
Museum (Vol. 17, Part 2 and Part 5; Vol. 19, Part 2).
In 1919 Tucker, S.H. Haughton* and K.H. Barnard*, on the
instructions of L.A. Peringuey*, director of the South African Museum,
excavated Montagu Cave in the Western Cape.
Tucker left the museum in 1921 to join the Division of
Entomology in the Department of Agriculture. By 1924 he was working on mites, which
were a serious pest in the deciduous fruit orchards of the Cape Province. He
described 'The black sand mite: Penthaleus
destructor, n. sp.' (1925) and 'Some South African mites' (1926) in the Entomology Memoirs of the Department of
Agriculture (No. 3, pp. 21-36 and No. 5, pp. 1-15). With H.K. Munro, E.P.
Felt and C.H. Curran he also described New
African gall midges (SA Department of Agriculture, 1926, 48 pp.) Around
this time he left South Africa to take up an appointment as chief entomologist
in the Department of Scientific Agriculture in Barbados. He appears to have
remained there for the rest of his career. His work and publications during
this period had to do mainly with the biological control of the sugar cane pest
Diatraea saccharalis. The genus Tuckerella (Acari) was named after him in 1940. On 19 February 1921 he married Hilda Katherine Pope.
