[3] Her 1951 publication of a paper titled "Unusual Scalp Dermatitis in Humans Caused by the Mite, Dermatophagoides (Acarina, epidermoptidae)" about her own symptoms led to a retrospective diagnosis of delusional parasitosis.
She earned her bachelor's degree at Cornell University between 1914 and 1918, majoring in biology, and studying under Anna Botsford Comstock, and in the ambience of the aquatic entomologist James George Needham.
[1] Traver held various jobs after graduating, starting in a New York cafeteria in 1919, with a spell back in Cornell under Comstock.
After 1920 she spent some years as an elementary school supervisor in Wilmington, Delaware, and later served as acting head of biology in Shorter College, Georgia.
The paper argues on the basis of study of the forewing of Siphlonurus that the primitive condition of the mayfly wing is to fold in pleats on the upstroke, fanning out somewhat on the downstroke.
She wrote on the mayflies of North America, the Himalayas, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
[1] In 1951, Traver published a paper titled "Unusual Scalp Dermatitis in Humans Caused by the Mite, Dermatophagoides (Acarina, epidermoptidae)" summarizing her personal experience.
[11] Jeffrey Lockwood writes that "Traver's account was a vivid, poignant, and tragic autobiography of a woman driven to desperate measures to affirm the reality of her delusion".
She was the honorary chairman of the First International Conference on Ephemeroptera at Florida A&M University in 1970, where she was given an achievement plaque and a key to the city of Tallahassee.