Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Because Henry was hired as an educator as well as a researcher, he had to coexist
in an academic environment—and the biology department was not without its tensions.
Edward Taylor, a tall, lantern-jawed herpetologist who'd been at K.U. for decades and
taught comparative anatomy, was engaged in a bitter feud with Hall. Taylor was cor-
dial to the new ecologist, but his habit of explosively saying things like “The boss is a
crook!” embarrassed Henry, who felt that agreeing would be disloyal and was wary of
the older man. A few years later William Duellman arrived with a Michigan Ph.D. as the
new curator of herpetology, and would become among the twentieth century's most ac-
complished vertebrate biologists. His hard-charging personality didn't preclude a cor-
dial working relationship with Henry, such that each named new species of lizards after
the other.
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The 1950s and 1960s were years of intense transition in biology. Watson and Crick
announced discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, experimental approaches were
increasingly emphasized in curricular and hiring decisions, and K.U. was a hotspot
for ecology and evolution. Bright students came to Lawrence from all over the United
States, exemplified by Paul Ehrlich, who was in Henry's first ecology course and later
became a distinguished Stanford conservation biologist. Within a decade after Fitch's
arrival his department included Charles Michener, who studied bee behavior; Robert
Sokal and James Rohlf, pioneers in biostatistics; and Daniel Janzen, a charismatic leader
in the emerging discipline of tropical biology—all of whom were eventually elected to
the National Academy of Sciences. True to form, Henry steered clear of campus politics
and only reluctantly attended departmental meetings; colleagues accurately regarded
him as off in his own world.
For many years animal ecology was Henry's main teaching responsibility, but he also
covered elementary biology and other classes. While he was on sabbatical in 1967-1968
the department reorganized and new faculty members were brought on board. Henry
was switched to animal natural history, a less theoretical course, in which he adopted
Grinnell's tactic of having undergrads read out loud from their field notes. Some of his
graduate students worked on mammals, and there was even a chigger man, but most of
them were herpetologists. Donald Clark, for example, conducted the first field study of a
burrowing reptile, the western worm snake, while Michael Plummer's dissertation was
mentoring style mirrored Grinnell's as well, with advice typically given in the form of
questions and oblique commentary rather than detailed instructions, direct criticism, or
unequivocal demands.
Dogged pursuit of natural history ran counter to an already widespread emphasis
on experimental biology. Charles Elton and David Lack in England and Evelyn Hutchin-
son at Yale were posing sweeping questions about ecosystems, yet in 1960 Henry's
in terms of synecology—the study of natural communities—or tested life history theory
by comparing species, but although Henry summarized reptile population biology in
several long papers, he didn't dwell on conceptual matters. His fieldwork emphasized
the roles of particular species at the Reservation; perhaps jostling with the likes of
Michener and Sokal was all the more daunting for a shy, unpretentious person who'd
rather be looking for skinks. There were years, nonetheless, in which Fitch publications
were more often cited than those of any of his K.U. colleagues.
