Dethier, Vincent Gaston (1915–1993)

US entomologist. He researched the food choices of caterpillars before going into academia to teach biology, eventually joining the faculty of the University of Massachusetts. He also published, and occasionally illustrated, popular books and short stories for adult and juvenile readers.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and started his career as an entomologist at the GW Pierce Laboratory in Franklin, New Hampshire and then became an assistant at the Cruft Physics Laboratory, Harvard University. While researching the plant-feeding choices of swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, he became the first to prove that caterpillars select their food by the plant's taste and smell, not its nutritional value. He taught biology at John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio, served in the Army Chemical Corps as a research physiologist, then became a professor at Ohio State University, before moving to Johns Hopkins, where he investigated chemoreception in black blowflies. He became a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and concurrently was an associate at the Institute of Neural Science School of Medicine. It was after serving as a professor at Princeton that he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts. He made major contributions to insect physiology and the life history of Lepidoptera.