Magdalena K. P. Smith Meyer

Her dissertation on prostigmatic mites associated with plants in South Africa was completed in 1959, which earned her a DSc in Zoology.

In 1964 she received a bursary from the Canadian Research Council and over the next year she visited several acarologists in Canada, the United States of America and Europe.

She also advised on economically important mites on different crops to countries in southern Africa including Angola, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

[1] Amongst other works, Meyer co-contributed to a chapter on Acari in the Biogeography and Ecology of Southern Africa series: In 1983 she initiated the first biodiversity survey of mites.

From the data collected in the survey she published four papers on the mite fauna of the South African National Parks.

She was also senior author of the first checklist of Acari of the Ethiopian region and published articles on mite faunas of Cameroon, the Cape Verde Islands, Costa Rica, Israel, Zimbabwe and Yemen.