Watch these videos for more insight to Charles Henry Turner's life:
Charles Henry Turner taught high school and college science classes for over 30 years. During this time, he studied insect behavior using his background in biology and psychology. Turner's work changed the way that insect behavior was understood and studied. This quote from Encyclopedia Britannica summarizes this change well: "[in the early 1900s], the study of insect behaviour was dominated by 19th-century concepts of taxis and kinesis, in which social insects are seen to alter their behaviour in specific responses to specific stimuli. Through his observations Turner was able to establish that insects can modify their behaviour as a result of experience."
More on the specific contributions Dr. Turner made to insect behavior research: "During his 33-year career, Turner published more than 70 papers, many of them written while he confronted numerous challenges, including restrictions on his access to laboratories and research libraries and restrictions on his time due to a heavy teaching load at Sumner [High School]. Furthermore, Turner received meagre pay and was not given the opportunity to train research students at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. Despite these challenges, he published several morphological studies of vertebrates and invertebrates. Turner also designed apparatuses (such as mazes for ants and cockroaches and coloured disks and boxes for testing the visual abilities of honeybees), conducted naturalistic observations, and performed experiments on insect navigation, death feigning, and basic problems in invertebrate learning...He developed novel procedures to study pattern and colour recognition in honeybees (Apis), and he discovered that cockroaches trained to avoid a dark chamber in one apparatus retained the behaviour when transferred to a differently shaped apparatus" (Encyclopedia Britannica).
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