Biology Reference
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with him the next time I came home to Fort Worth. He shared a small office with anoth-
er professor, Thomas Kennerly. At my knock the door crept open, revealing a Darwin-
like figure with a largish bald head, dark bushy eyebrows, and a cropped mustache that
accentuated his somewhat pinched mouth. Bill wore a bow tie and smelled like pipe
smoke. “Are you really interested in biology,” he asked, rocking on his heels and sticking
out one hand with an air of skeptical detachment, “or just a snake collector?” I wasn't
quite sure what that meant, but after some pleasantries he ushered me down a hallway
and opened a closet door labeled Collection of Vertebrates. From floor to ceiling the
shelves were chock-full of amphibians and reptiles in jars of alcohol, and in our subse-
quent meetings it seemed as if each specimen posed a question.
I visited Bill often after transferring to Texas Wesleyan College in the fall of 1966,
encouraged that this shy, bright man thought me worth his time. One day he pulled out
a pickled snake that in life was orange with a black head, black neck ring, and black
spot at the base of the tail. Then, fixing me with his “What do you think?” look, he ex-
plained that the specimen came from the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas in southern Veracruz,
Mexico. “Probably a female, based on the slender tail,” I responded, hoping to impress
him, “but what is it?” He handed me another jar containing two collapsed eggshells and
two hatchling snakes, one patterned like its mother and the other with black bands all
along its body. “Those two oddly colored animals won't key out to any known genus,”
Bill said with a quizzical grin, “but the banded hatchling is some sort of Pliocercus.
After a few hours of library research, I'd learned that numerous species and geo-
graphical races of Pliocercus had been named based solely on their colorful markings,
making it all the more intriguing that those Tuxtla snakes differed dramatically within
a single clutch of eggs. What if, in fact, only one species occurred in all of Mexico and
Central America? Bill generously suggested that I examine more museum specimens,
then publish the results during my upcoming military hitch. 4 While I was overseas in
the army, he encouraged me to return for a master's degree at what had become the
University of Texas at Arlington, and when my grades warranted only probationary ad-
mission he rescued my sputtering career by arranging a teaching assistantship.
That fall of 1971 Bill let me dangle in uncertainty over a thesis topic, as had Joseph
Grinnell with his student Fitch, and coincidentally I almost emulated Henry's solution.
Most of whatever biology I'd previously learned had faded, and although my research
soon focused on behavior, that first semester I scarcely knew what it encompassed. I
turned to Texas alligator lizards for lack of a better plan, having earlier discovered their
parental care with my friend Ben Dial, 5 but soon a boldly colored topic and some even
more garishly marked snakes diverted me. Thirty-five years would pass before I pub-
lished anything else on my teenage favorites.
The orange cover of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Ethology drew me into an account of
how Niko Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch, and Konrad Lorenz studied what animals do from
a naturalistic rather than a human-centered, psychological perspective. 6 Beginning in
the 1930s they focused on insects and birds to address four questions, formalized by
Tinbergen in 1963: 7 How is behavior controlled by motivational and sensory mechan-
isms, such as hunger and taste? How is it shaped by genetics and development, includ-
ing experience? What roles does it play in survival and reproduction, and thus how does
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