Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
imprinting—by which young animals form long-term attractions to specific stimuli, of-
ten associated with food or other animals—and unlike most psychologists at the time he
espoused ethological perspectives. Hess gave Burghardt lab space for undergraduate
research on turtles and lizards but couldn't allow snakes, because his wife hated them.
Gordon crammed cages of newborn gartersnakes into his tiny student apartment, and
only after Hess encouraged him to stay on for a doctorate did the two of them overturn
the “no snakes” rule.
Gordon's dissertation combined his knack for chemistry with an interest in young
animals, addressing Tinbergen's four questions in terms of how naive young of eco-
logically diverse serpents respond to prey cues. Plains gartersnakes, for example, at-
tacked cotton swabs laced with the scent of leeches, worms, fish, or frogs, but they
only tongue-flicked cricket and mouse odors. Other species also preferred chemical sig-
natures of their natural diets, and baby queen snakes reacted only to
freshly molted
crayfish, consistent with specialization on soft-shelled crustaceans. Exceptions were in-
structive too: Butler's gartersnakes eat leeches and worms, but neonates also respon-
ded to fish and frog odors, so their preferences evidently hadn't yet diverged from those
of close relatives; corn snakes and cottonmouths, which have broad diets, scarcely dis-
criminated among extracts, suggesting that for them preprogramming might be detri-
mental. Overall, snake behavior, evoked by specific stimuli and without prior experien-
ce, nicely matched ethological notions of instinct.
When we first met, Gordon had thinning brown hair and a moustache that later
morphed into a beard. My preconceptions about lab-bound psychologists, preoccupied
with caged pigeons and white rats, were soon squashed by his enthusiasm for a battered
old Jeep and snake hunting in the nearby Cumberland Mountains. He was proud of a
summer spent at Lorenz's research institute in Bavaria, and his contagious enthusi-
asm for all things ethological fostered a challenging intellectual atmosphere. Gordon
gave talks at meetings and openly grappled with theoretical issues, for example, and
he eagerly tried novel approaches, from tropical fieldwork to high-tech brain imaging.
Besides snakes, he was studying black bears in the Smoky Mountains and green iguanas
in Panama. And down the road, as we will ponder later, he would broaden Tinbergen's
manifesto to include a bold fifth question about the inner worlds of animals.
Gordon dealt praise sparingly but was otherwise supportive, even cosigning a bank
loan so I could buy a car, and we graduate students admired our professor all the
more for a certain quirkiness. Among his eccentricities was a fondness for Honduran
cigars, smelly brown things that everyone dreaded him lighting up. At one social gath-
ering, shortly after lecturing to our advanced ethology class about sign stimuli and their
corresponding internal releasing mechanisms—witness the attractive effects of a male
stickleback fish's red belly on females of the same species—he fired up a huge stogie
and placed it on an ashtray under his chair. Within minutes a Siamese cat sauntered
up and made stereotypical fecal burying movements, at which point Gordon sheepishly
laughed with the rest of us about its ethological commentary on those cigars!
For a course project that first semester I videotaped captive boas and pythons, then
confirmed with slow-motion film analysis that they applied killing coils in identical fash-
ion, yet differently from more recently evolved ratsnakes and kingsnakes. My term pa-
per explained that while homology, a core concept in comparative anatomy, refers to
ancestral resemblance—the homologously enlarged incisors with which rats and squir-
