Graduate School - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 56

Things went well until a new assistant professor showed up and demanded justifica-
tion for my thesis topic. “Because coralsnakes are beautiful and fascinating,” I replied,
caught off guard, and Robert McMahon shot back, “You mean this is just a game for
you?” I sat speechless as Bill jumped in with “Oh come on, Bob, during physiological
experiments on snails you're thinking, 'I'll study mollusks and save humanity? '” Many
years later I would be embroiled in a parallel debate about the importance of natural
history and see wisdom in Bob's question, but that afternoon I was deeply grateful for
my advisor's protective response. The few minutes I waited for the committee's favor-
able decision seemed interminable. The sixty-six-page thesis was the longest document
I'd ever typed.
McMahon's challenge notwithstanding, two topics I read at U.T.A. underscored the
interplay of natural history and scientific theory, and a third solidified my career path.
George Schaller's TheSerengetiLion summarized three thousand hours of fieldwork in
service of questions like, how do carnivores affect prey populations and why does that
species live in groups, when most cats are solitary hunters? 19 Peter Klopfer's Behavior-
al Aspects of Ecology linked what individual animals do with antipredator adaptations,
causes of high tropical diversity, and other classic puzzles, while R.F. Ewer's Ethology
of Mammals showed how studying diverse behaviors across a group of animals might
link my interests in other aspects of biology. 20 Accordingly, and having noticed that aca-
demic positions were usually advertised for evolution and other conceptual disciplines
rather than taxonomic specialties like herpetology, I sought a Ph.D. program in which to
study reptiles from the standpoint of issues framed by these authors.
Gordon Burghardt's publications on reptile behavior had caught my attention while
Donna and I lived in Germany, and we'd taken his “readers' advice,” in a European
travel guide, about renting motor bikes in southern France. So after some correspond-
ence about mutual interests, I gave a talk about coralsnake feeding to his research
group at the University of Tennessee. The zoology department's admissions committee
discounted my earlier bad grades in the face of respectable Graduate Record Exam
scores and publications, and thus late that summer, newly divorced, I was off to the
Volunteer State. Soon enough I'd endure a doctoral exam that made Bob McMahon's
questions seem cheerfully supportive.
In 1973 the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, an honor previously unimaginable
for organismal biologists, went to Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch
for founding ethology. Burghardt was beaming about the laureates when I arrived in his
Knoxville lab that fall, and I couldn't have been prouder of my newly adopted discipline
or more awed by my advisor. 21 Only four years older than me, he was a widely read,
creative thinker and committed Darwinian. Right away I noticed a quote on his desk
from Norman Maclean, a University of Chicago English professor who years later would
shape my own literary ambitions: “A good teacher is a tough guy who cares deeply about
something that is hard to understand.”
Reptiles had fascinated Gordon since his Wisconsin childhood, when he'd bought
green anoles from a circus, kept red-eared sliders as pets, and caught gartersnakes in
vacant lots. Initially a chemistry major at Chicago, he switched to biopsychology and fell
under the spell of an austere but inspiring professor. Eckhard Hess pioneered studies of