Tiny Fish Makes Big Splash
Read about Dr. David Etnier’s Snail Darter legacy here:
EEB Graduate Receives Fulbright Award
Spring 2023 EEB honors graduate Colton Adams received a Fulbright student award. Read about his plans here: https://news.utk.edu/2023/05/17/11-ut-students-receive-fulbright-awards/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2023-24%20Fulbright%20student%20awards&utm_campaign=TN%20Today
EEB Department Alumnus Weighs in on Shy Spiders
Dr. Angela Chuang, formerly of the Riechert lab, was consulted for this NY Times article on Joro Spiders, and whether current research is in fact proving how shy the species can be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/science/joro-spiders.html
An Untraditional Concentration
Pursuing his DDS at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, John Patrick (J.P.) Carney (’13) begins his fourth and final year of dental school this fall. He will graduate May 2019. A graduate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Carney received his BS in biological sciences with a concentration in ecology and evolutionary biology. Before he began his first year at UT, Carney knew he wanted to become a dentist.
Although biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology and chemistry are two of the traditional pre-dental majors, Carney declared his major in biological sciences with a concentration in EEB. He decided on an untraditional concentration after becoming acquainted with other pre-health students in his prerequisite classes. With most of the requirements completed, Carney discovered his niche, electing to focus his studies in the area that would allow him to stand out during the intensely competitive environment of dental school admissions. The experience of EEB allowed Carney to master the art of communication, which contributes to his success in dental school. Likewise, the correlation of lecture topics with weekly field trips to places like Ijams Nature Center and the Knoxville Zoo allowed members of the EEB department to find balance in real world application of knowledge.
The study of ecology and evolutionary biology is a prime example of the way people can benefit from having diversity in the classroom and in life. Carney found an environment of great diversity waiting for him at Meharry Medical College, a school that welcomes all to its campus and exemplifies the concept of diversity. The diversity among dental students created an inclusive atmosphere that facilitated the treatment of patients from all around the world. This level of diversity taught Carney an important concept in healthcare: cultural competency, a factor that can impact overall patient satisfaction and quality of care. More diversity in the classroom or a healthcare setting can ultimately lead to substantially improved interprofessional collaboration, which can help reduce medical errors, improve the quality of care, and meet the needs of diverse populations. Taking in different perspectives on problems facing the healthcare industry is key to finding solutions and providing patients with optimal care and satisfaction.
Carney looks forward to utilizing the lessons he learned in EEB in his future practice. As a general dentist, he plans to further his knowledge in implant dentistry to provide patients the highest standard of dental care. Knoxville will always be home sweet home, and he knows that the future is bright on Rocky Top.
Kalisz & Fukami Elected to ASN Leadership
EEB Department Head Susan Kalisz has been elected as President 2020 of the American Society of Naturalists. Congratulations!
Alumnus Tadashi Fukami (PhD 2003) has also been elected to the leadership of ASN, as Secretary 2019-2021.
I Will Make Tennessee Proud
Pre-eminent entomologist Carl Huffaker (’38, ’39) never forgot the kindness of a UT president.
By Brooks Clark (’16)
Among the pleasures of working in UT alumni relations are the occasions when long, lost alums or their families come back to campus and we get to revisit the old sights and introduce them to the new show. Last summer, Tom and Claire Huffaker, a son and daughter-in-law of Carl Huffaker (’38, ’39), made their first visit to see the university that Huffaker, who died in 1995, had remembered fondly. They had made their pilgrimage to Knoxville to learn more about a story that was an important part of their family lore.
As Carl Huffaker had always told it, he had graduated from high school in Kentucky in 1933, worked a half year for Civilian Conservation Corps, part of FDR’s New Deal, and then a few months for the Tennessee Valley Authority, another part of FDR’ New Deal, preparing land for inundation behind Norris Dam, which was then under construction about 30 miles north of Knoxville. Huffaker, a farm boy fascinated by insects, wanted to enroll in UT’s entomology program, one of the better programs in the region. But he couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.
Huffaker said he met with UT’s president and proposed that, if he were allowed to pay in-state fees, he would make Tennessee proud. “You seem like a fine young man,” the president had replied. “You have a deal.” Tom and Claire Huffaker didn’t know the name of the kindly president or any other details about this meeting in 1934—only that it made the rest of Carl Huffaker’s life possible and caused him to speak fondly of UT.
Huffaker had gone on to earn two UT degrees—his bachelor’s in entomology in 1938 and a master’s in plant ecology in 1939. He earned his PhD in entomology/ecology from Ohio State in 1942 and taught entomology at the University of California at Berkeley for five decades, carrying out groundbreaking research and becoming a national leader in his field.
Since I had worked for TVA and valued its history, especially from its inception in the darkest days of the Depression, I was especially interested in showing the Huffakers around campus. When I met Tom, I learned quickly that he had been born and raised in Berkeley, California, where his father had been a longtime professor. I was pleased to learn that Tom was not only born in the same year that I was, 1956, but he was also, a “late hatch (pioneer language),” as his father put it in a family remembrance—born a few years after his older siblings.
We started at the Hill, where Carl Huffaker had had his entomology classes and labs. When we passed the John C. Hodges Library, I noted that Huffaker would have taken freshman English from Hodges or a professor following Hodges’ innovative method of marking papers that in 1941 became the Harbrace College Handbook. When we came to Neyland Stadium, where freshman English papers had for decades been stored in a vault, Tom mentioned that his father had worked in a dining hall that served the football team, a job that came with one healthy meal per day. Huffaker often recalled in later years that, lacking any money, for the rest of each day after his meal at the dining hall, he was always hungry. In those Depression years, others had it worse, but his childhood had prepared him well to get by in tough times.
A Hardscrabble Childhood on the Farm
Huffaker had been born in Monticello, Kentucky, on September 30, 1914, the fifth of six sons of Dewitt and Elizabeth Huffaker. Dewitt was shot to death when Carl was three, leaving Elizabeth to raise her boys alone. Augmenting the income from the family farm as a county clerk—the county’s first female elected official—she was determined to provide her sons the wherewithal to rise above their rural poverty.
While his brothers were unruly mountain boys, Huffaker had suffered a torn Achilles tendon as child, which left him physically impaired and inclined to studiousness, even after he had the tendon repaired as a young adult. As a child, he grew intrigued by the pigeons that roosted in the barn, which led to a lifelong passion for pigeon racing. Huffaker had also been intrigued by the impact of pests on agriculture. In a Monticello High biology class, he took special note when he read a statement by US Department of Agriculture entomologist Leland Ossian Howard that his field would need many young people in future years.
With jobs scarce in 1933, Elizabeth had signed her son up for a six-month tour with the Civilian Conservation Corps after high school. Huffaker and some of his friends were sent to California, where he built campgrounds and did fire-lookout scouting in an isolated back canyon close to Glendale. Of his $30 monthly pay, he was given $5. The rest was sent home to his family, as was the CCC custom of the day.
When Huffaker returned home, his mother presented him with his $150 of earnings and instructed him to go out and get an education. She also signed him up for another New Deal program, the TVA, and its first project, Norris Dam, in Clinton, Tennessee. “My first job was to work in the reservoir clearance program,” wrote Huffaker. “Because of my interest in entomology and botany, I was assigned to survey the whole 800-mile reservoir shoreline for malarial mosquitoes and debris collected on the banks, which was important to the malarial mosquito breeding.”
An Act of Kindness, Never Forgotten
Drawn to the University of Tennessee’s entomology program, Huffaker enrolled that fall but found that, with just $150 he could not afford out-of-state tuition.
Tom asked me what the difference would have been in 1934. I asked Research Librarian Alesha Shumar, who sent us pages from the UT Record. Out-of-state tuition was then $171 a year, plus $75 in registration fees. Tuition was free to in-state students. Registration fees were $45. Dorm rooms were $25-$30 per month for all male students.
With a little research, I also found that the president Huffaker met with was Harcourt Morgan. Perhaps by lucky happenstance, Morgan was a professor of entomology (and zoology) and one of the three charter directors of TVA. It seemed likely to me that Huffaker had impressed Morgan by describing his TVA work in mosquito remediation the summer before. Huffaker was certainly lucky that, in his TVA role, Morgan was a visionary of sorts, committed to revolutionizing the economy, the river system, the soil, and the farming practices of the Tennessee Valley.
In 1936, while still a student, Huffaker had married Saralyn Knight, a Maryville College student he met while they were both working on Norris Dam. Huffaker worked at night in a blue-printing machine laboratory and spent three summers, beginning in 1937, working on malaria control for TVA. They had a son, Ronald, in 1938, another son, Hal, in 1940, and a daughter, Carolyn, in 1942, when Huffaker earned his PhD from Ohio State.
A National Authority
During the war years, Huffaker worked on antimalaria efforts in Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. “Carl was amazing in his ability to analyze large amounts of complex experimental data and quickly reach accurate, sensible conclusions,” said a colleague.
Huffaker joined the University of California in 1946. His first assignment, in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture, was to lead the effort to biologically control the Klamath weed, also known as St. John’s wort, which had become a scourge on California range lands. By introducing insects that fed exclusively on the weed, they were able to eradicate the problem. It was the first of many of Huffaker’s innovations in biological pest control that led to incalculable benefits to agriculture, especially in California.
He was among the first entomologists to study the use of DDT to control mosquito populations. Then, after DDT was banned, he played a pioneering leadership role in developing and introducing his seminal proposal on Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. In a six-year project that drew on the expertise of hundreds of scientists from various disciplines and culminated in the 1978 proposal “The Principles, Strategies, and Tactics of Pest Population Regulation and Control in Major Crop Ecosystems” outlined a methodology for, as described by George Kennedy in the summer 2004 issue of American Entomologist, “improved, ecologically oriented pest-management systems that optimized long-term costs and benefits of crop protection to the farmer, society, and the environment.”
The Huffaker Project, as it came to be known, “played a seminal role in training IPM scientists and building the infrastructure necessary for the continued development and adoption of IPM in the United States.” A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Huffaker published hundreds of papers. He retired from Berkeley in 1984 but remained active on campus until his death on October 10, 1995.
As we returned to Tyson Alumni House, I thanked the Huffakers for the opportunity to show them around UT. “My father loved this place, and what it did for him,” said Tom. “He said he would always make Tennessee proud, and I think that throughout his life he wanted to make sure that he did. We wanted to visit UT partly to say that our family has never forgotten what Tennessee did for my father, and we never will.”
After their visit the Huffakers made a gift to UT, matched by Tom’s employer, Exxon-Mobil, to go toward scholarships for entomology students.
New Plant Species and Habitat Near Knoxville
A paper describing the discovery of a new plant species, the Leatherleaf Tassel Rue (Trautvetteria fonticalcarea), was just published by recent UT graduate Aaron Floden (PhD 2017) in the Nordic Journal of Botany. Floden, writing with his PhD advisor Prof. Ed Schilling, also provided the first published description of the unique habitat in which this plant species grows, which occurs along the Powell River just north of Knoxville, Tennessee. Seep drainages formed by springs occur over a unique limestone substrate type in the area, producing small garden-like arrays of grasses and grass-like plants, herbaceous perennials, and small shrubs, but lacking trees. The seeps host other distinctive plants, many of which reach the southern-most extent of their natural ranges and are found in Tennessee only in this distinctive habitat. These include such beautiful plants as the Showy Lady’s Slipper and a form of Grass of Parnassus that may also be new. Floden, who is now on the staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden, has been working with TVA biologist Adam Datillo to compile and map a complete list of seep sites along the Powell River, with an eye toward considering ways to keep them preserved. Some of the larger seep areas may have been partially or completely inundated when Norris Dam was built, but there are still many nice examples. The springs that form the seeps are also utilized as a source of water by local residents. The seeps and their plants are a unique gem in the east Tennessee landscape that are worth saving for future generations to enjoy and appreciate.
The full article can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/njb.01738/full
No Fortuitous Short-Cuts When Deciding Conservation Priorities
The Armsworth Lab has a new open-access publication out in Nature Communications: “Factoring economic costs into conservation planning may not improve agreement over priorities for protection.” It is a collaboration between an interdisciplinary team of UT researchers with scientists at The Nature Conservancy and focuses on how best to identify candidate areas for establishing nature reserves.
Co-authors include Research Assistant Professor Heather Jackson, former graduate students Gwen Iacona (PhD 2014, now a postdoc at the University of Queensland) and Nate Sutton (MS 2014, now a data scientist for MedAmerica), and former postdoc Eric Larson (now faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
The abstract is pasted below.
Conservation organizations must redouble efforts to protect habitat given continuing biodiversity declines. Prioritization of future areas for protection is hampered by disagreements over what the ecological targets of conservation should be. Here we test the claim that such disagreements will become less important as conservation moves away from prioritizing areas for protection based only on ecological considerations and accounts for varying costs of protection using return-on-investment (ROI) methods. We combine a simulation approach with a case study of forests in the eastern United States, paying particular attention to how covariation between ecological benefits and economic costs influences agreement levels. For many conservation goals, agreement over spatial priorities improves with ROI methods. However, we also show that a reliance on ROI-based prioritization can sometimes exacerbate disagreements over priorities. As such, accounting for costs in conservation planning does not enable society to sidestep careful consideration of the ecological goals of conservation.
Milt (PhD 2015) Recognized by Conservation Biology
Austin Milt (PhD 2015, now a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin) won third place in Conservation Biology’s ‘Rising Star’ award for his manuscript, “The Costs of Avoiding Environmental Impacts from Shale-Gas Surface Infrastructure.” The Rising Star award considers all student led papers published in Conservation Biology in 2016. This award is judged by a group of Senior Editors and aims to recognize outstanding student researchers and communicators.