When Betty McMahan was 14 years old, a girl growing up on a farm in Davie County, she climbed into a tall tree near her home and left a memento there for the ages. With a short-bladed Boy Scout knife, she carved the words "I will be a great biologist" into the wood.

   Now, more than a half century later, Dr. Elizabeth McMahan looks back on a long and eventful career in the sciences.

   "I became a biologist," she said as she sat near a stack of articles, which she's amassed inside her Chapel Hill condo, about her work in the field of entomology. "I don't think I became a great one."

   McMahan is a modest woman - the people who know her best will readily admit to that much. But she doesn't have to tout her own accomplishments to earn recognition for the work.

   Last year, McMahan received a call from a Dutch taxonomist, Pieter van Doesburg, who wanted permission to name a newly classified species of insect for her. This Latin American insect, one of several species better known as assassin bugs, now bears the scientific name Salyavata MacMahanae.

   The saga of the insect's christening began further back, when van Doesburg tried to reach McMahan about another, similar bug she had studied more than 20 years ago in Costa Rica.

   "I was away when he tried contacting me," McMahan recalled. "He also got my e-mail. So when I came back there was this message: 'Do you have any specimens?"

   McMahan had gathered several samples of these assassin bugs while studying the termites on which they feed. She sent them to van Doesburg and didn't think much of the incident until she received the fateful message announcing the discovery of a new species.

   Van Doesburg scrutinized the specimens under a microscope, carefully measuring their dimensions, and detected variations between them that are almost imperceptible to the naked eye.

   His discovery was not the first piece of significant news that emerged from McMahan's field study of assassin bugs. In 1980, she spotted a juvenile form of a similar assassin bug on a nest of termites, catching members of the colony in an ingenious way.

   The insect was almost impossible to perceive because it lay covered in the partially digested wood chips, called carton, that termites use to build their nests. In spite of its camouflage, McMahan noticed the insect crawl toward a hole in the nest, where it caught a small termite with its legs, which work like Velcro to mesh with the hairs on the termite's body. Then, the assassin bug held the termite back over the edge of the hole.

   "If a termite dies or is injured, they eat it and, thereby, get more protein," McMahan explained. Another termite grabbed onto the carcass that the assassin bug was holding. "So he just pulled it back gradually.

   "I thought, 'It looks like he's fishing.' "

   McMahan claims that the insect was using the termite's carcass as a tool for pulling other members of the colony out of the hole - an incredible discovery considering the relative scarcity of genuine tool use among animals.

   Years ago, scientists thought that man was the only animal that used tools. Since then, researchers have witnessed chimpanzees using branches, stripped of their leaves, to pull termites out of their nests; otters cracking oyster shells over small rocks; and a certain species of bird employing cactus needles to catch insects. The assassin bug was able to do much the same thing in an extremely reliable way.

   "He did it 31 times, and I was watching everything and writing it down in my notes," McMahan said.

   McMahan documented the assassin bug's hunting technique in several scientific journals since she observed it in practice; it was even videotaped for the BBC documentary "Alien Empire." More than two decades have passed since she made the discovery, but the excitement of it still hasn't worn off on McMahan.

   "It's just so much fun," she said. "This was something I knew nobody had seen. There was some question as to had this really happened ... but we have pictures now."

   McMahan has tried to instill young people with this same sense of the fun in making scientific discoveries as a professor at UNC, and, after she retired, as a Peace Corps volunteer at a rural college in Jamaica.

   "This is why I think research is so important," she said. "You have to be a good teacher, but unless you do research, you don't get excited about it."

   In Jamaica, McMahan encountered obstacles to getting students excited about science that are unfamiliar to professors in the United States. She recalled not having textbooks to teach the material in her freshman zoology class, and having to hold class sessions on the front porch of her home during occasional blackouts that shut down the college.

   "They had such a tough time, and they gave me such a tough time," McMahan said. "They felt like they didn't have much of a future, and they were demoralized."

   McMahan still keeps in touch with some of the students she taught in Jamaica as freshmen. She seems to have made quite an impression on them; as seniors, the class that she taught dedicated their yearbook to her in absentia.

   "She was very serious about teaching," said Nelson Hairston, a former Kenan professor in the biology department. "She knew it was important, and she didn't cotton up to her students - she didn't suck up to them."

   Today, McMahan devotes most of her time to writing and illustrating children's books based on her own memories of growing up on a farm. She also travels extensively as a passenger on an Australian freightliner named the Melborne Star. Science continues to be a passion for her, and as much recognition as she receives for her work, McMahan persists in playing it down.

   "She's too modest about herself and her accomplishments," Hairston said. "She's quite well known in her field."

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