[1] During his school years in the hills above Oakland, California, where his father was a woodworker, he developed such a passion for entomology that he acquired the nickname "Bugs."
Meanwhile, back in Honolulu, D. Elmo Hardy and others began publishing further volumes of Insects of Hawaii devoted to the exceptionally rich variety of Diptera (true flies) in the islands, a variety Zimmerman had called attention to in a short contribution to Evolution in 1958 with the provocative title, "300 insect species of Drosophila in Hawaii?—A challenge to geneticists and evolutionists" (Evolution 12, pp.
557–558).This paper helped stimulate one of the most outstanding and scientifically rewarding long-term, multidisciplinary research efforts in the history of evolutionary biology, encompassing systematics, genetics, ecology, and ethology of the Drosophila complex.
[6]By the 1970s, however, Zimmerman had trouble securing the funds needed to keep working on Insects of Hawaii and ended up accepting a generous offer from Douglas Waterhouse at Australia's CSIRO to turn his attention to producing another ambitious multivolume monograph, this time on Australian Weevils.
In 1992, they moved from their cattle station near Canberra to a home and laboratory on Tura Beach, where Zimmerman spent his remaining years.
The out-of-print volumes follow: Australian Weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) is an 8-volume, comprehensive monograph that includes all the recorded species, with notes about their distributions, economic importance, host plants, and life histories, amply illustrated with roughly 10,000 images, over half of them in color.