CONGRATULATIONS TO NEWLY ELECTED ABS FELLOWS
Maydianne Andrade
Maydianne Andrade is a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II)
Integrative Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences,
University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Andrade:
“Maydianne is best known for her novel and exciting work on sexual cannibalism in widow spiders. Maydianne initially grabbed our attention by carefully quantifying, describing, and analyzing the ecological costs that lead male redback spiders to sacrifice themselves for a mating opportunity. The work was field-based, rigorous, and tremendously creative, providing the first solid evidence that severe ecological constraints could be as important as paternity confidence or parental care in limiting male reproduction. Maydianne masterfully used this fascinating example of extreme behavior to address a fundamental question in behavioral ecology, turning it into an instant textbook classic and winning the ABS Young Investigator award. She then shifted her focus to females, where despite the uniqueness of her study system, Maydianne uncovered the elegantly simple and likely widespread result that instead of choosing males that are larger or more ornamented, females choose mates based on courtship duration. The finding was brilliantly novel, particularly in the context of the vast literature on the evolution of male sexual signals. It inspired several of us to move beyond the structure of male signals alone, and to explore more deeply the use of those signals in longer courtship interactions.”“Maydianne has an impressive publication record, has received numerous grants and awards, and has provided excellent training to postdocs, doctoral, MS & undergraduate scientists. Her level of engagement with the general public is phenomenal, and her work has been covered by every major scientific news outlet including the NY Times, BBC & CBC, NOVA, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Scientific American, Science and Nature News. Maydianne has done much more than most of us in terms of explaining behavioral research to the public.”
“Maydianne has been a generous member of our community. She served as ABS Program Officer from 2009-2013, and continues her service as a member of the ABS Diversity committee. She also served as a member of the Executive Committee for the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE) from 2008-2012.”
“Maydianne ́s scientific contributions to the field of animal behavior are outstanding. Her research is thematically focused upon sexual selection, and her studies explore the evolutionary ecology of spider mating behavior in different ecological and social contexts, to understand the development of phenotypic traits. Maydianne ́s stellar contributions are evident not only in her research specialty, but also in teaching and advising at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as in service to the field of animal behavior.”
Alexandra Basolo
Alexandra Basolo is a Full Professor
School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska Lincoln, USA.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Basolo:
“Alex received her PhD from the University of Texas and was immediately awarded postdoctoral fellowships from both of the major funding agencies in the USA for her postdoctoral research. After arriving at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she achieved an early promotion to both Associate Professor (1999) and Full Professor (2004). She was awarded a Fulbright to study in Italy; she received a NSF OPUS grant (Opportunity to Promote Understanding through Sysnthesis;); and she received a full NSF IOS grant in a highly competitive funding climate."
“Alex’s research in the 1990’s on swordtails and receiver biases had a profound impact. Alex [is] a role model – a leading female scientist doing cutting edge research and pushing our understanding of sexual selection in novel directions – opening up entirely new fields of study. She is a deep, critical, and creative thinker. [Her] research has resulted in what are now considered to be classic studies, and more recent studies that are likely to become classics. The quality and impact of her research is evidenced by the number of times it is highlighted in text books and synthetic reviews. Even 25+ years later, her research findings continue to influence the field.”
“In addition to scientific accolades, Alex has contributed considerable service to the Animal Behavior Society: Chair – Developing Nations Research Grants; Chair – Latin Student Travel Grants; Student Research Award Committee Member; Chair – Student Research Award Committee. Her service within the School of Biological Sciences and across the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are equally outstanding (see her current CV). I would like to highlight an additional service that I see as quite unique to Alex – her contribution to women in science. If I were asked to name the single individual that I have met throughout my entire career that is the most dedicated to advancing women in science, I would have no hesitation in naming Dr. Basolo. I could write an entire nomination letter on her contributions as a role model and an advocate for women in science alone (and I have), but I will simply note that her incredible contributions in this area were recognized and honored in 2011 when she was awarded the UNL Chancellor’s Outstanding Contribution to Improving the Status of Women award.”
Douglas Chivers
Douglas Chivers is a Full Professor and the Rawson Professor of Biology
Department of Biology, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Chivers:
“A defining characteristic of Doug’s work is taking an idea and exploring it from many perspectives. For instance, he recently realized that non-predator recognition is one of the most underappreciated aspects of anti-predator decision-making. This has led to a number of studies—in the lab and field as well as models to study the relative importance of predator vs. non-predator recognition in decision-making. And, he’s shown that learning may being much earlier than most of us might have expected, in the embryo."
“I find Doug’s work on antipredator behavior and cognition some of the most interesting work being conducted today. His early work on minnows and damselflies identified how prey animals could be conditioned to recognize predators with chemical alarm cues released from injured conspecifics and has become a powerful assay that Doug and others have used to study antipredator behavior. His work on generalization of predator recognition was pioneering in that it convincingly demonstrated that prey could use information about known predators to make ‘educated guesses’ about the predatory nature of other unknown animals. He showed that background level of risk influenced how prey categorize predators and non-predators and has applied this to understanding the potential impacts of invasive hybrid predators.”
“Over the years much of Doug’s work focused on the evolution of chemical alarm cues used by prey animals to mediate their risk of predation. His Ecoscience review became required reading the day it was published. Understanding the evolution of specialized alarm cells located in the skin of fishes has intrigued evolutionary ecologists because the release of the alarm chemicals is not voluntary but rather requires the sender to be killed. With little evidence of kin associations in the fish that he studies, he looked for other functional explanations, including that the chemicals evolved to attract secondary predators that disrupt the predation sequence allowing the prey to escape.”
“Recently he challenged the dogma that these cells evolved in a predation context in the first place. He showed that the cells were part of the immune system and that the cells have secondarily acquired an ecological role as alarm cues because selection favors receivers to detect and respond adaptively to public information about predation.”
Deborah Gordon
Deborah Gordon is a Full Professor
Department of Biology at Stanford University, USA.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Gordon:
"Deborah is an outstanding and influential scientist and a superb ambassador of the field of animal behavior to both th"e larger scientific community, and the public at large. She is best known for her elegant and meticulous analyses of ant societies. She has devoted her career to addressing what E.O Wilson called one of the central problems in sociobiology, how the activities of individual society members contribute to a smoothly functioning colony. The depth of this problem lies in the fact that individual members do not have global knowledge of the needs of the whole colony, and they have no leader to tell them what those needs are. Deborah has used many different kinds of methods, both empirical and theoretical, to analyze the question of how worker ants know what to do to to keep their colony going.”
“Deborah has a superb record of scientific accomplishment. She has published 150 papers, mostly in the top disciplinary journals of the field, including numerous papers in Animal Behavior. She also has eight publications in Nature, and has written two very well-received books. Deborah has received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and has won many awards on the Stanford campus.”
“Deborah also has been very successful in training the next generations of animal behavior specialists. She has supervised 15 doctoral students and 10 postdoctoral associates, and many of them have gone on to careers in science at various institutions around the world. She also has been active in the Animal Behavior Society, serving with distinction in a variety of capacities. Deborah has given many high-profile plenary lectures around the world, as well as a widely viewed TED talk and a World Economic Forum talk at Davos. She clearly has one of the highest public profiles of any animal behaviorist in the world.”
Molly Morris
Molly Morris is a Full Professor
Department of Biological Sciences at Ohio University, USA.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Morris:
“Molly’s contributions encompass important, ground-breaking empirical studies such as showing behavioral ecologists that females exhibit adaptive variation in their mate preferences. For a long time, it was thought that all females of a species should have similar preferences for some “best” male. Molly was one of the first to demonstrate that females can have polymorphisms in mate preferences, similar to the polymorphisms in male reproductive behaviors and morphologies. Studies of variation in female mate preference is now a growing field, and this work is leading to a better understanding of how the information about males that females gain by assessing different male traits, actually varies across different environments.”
“Molly has also been involved in several extensive interdisciplinary teams that provided novel insights into the evolution of communication during aggressive interactions. For example, Molly worked on game theory models at Indiana University with Dr. Roy Gardner (economist) and at Ohio University where they were the first to consider the possibility that bluffing could be evolutionarily stable. Molly worked with Dr. Winfred Just (mathematician) to explain the empirical result of eventual losers of contests initiating contests. She also worked with Dr. Jason Moretz (biologist) on several empirical studies that involved comparative analyses that demonstrated how the coevolution between signal of aggressive intent and response is likely to be evolutionarily labile given the extent to which this type of communication is cooperative.”
“Molly was also one of the first to find empirical support the hypothesis that when a genetically determined polymorphism is selectively maintained in a population, the different morphs should have equal fitness at equilibrium. Molly and colleagues demonstrated that the two swordtail morphs that have very different life history strategies and mating behaviors, have equal fitness. Molly’s research in this area has led to a much better understanding of how polymorphisms evolve and are maintained, with her most recent work examining how the evolution of differences between males using different tactics (tactical dimorphism) can be constrained by intralocus tactical conflict.”
“Molly has also extremely active in the society, serving on numerous review panels at National Science Foundation, and serving as the Secretary and then as President of the Animal Behavior Society. She has also served as an Associate Editor for Behaviour and is currently serving as an Editor for Animal Behaviour.”
Philip Stoddard
Philip Stoddard is a Full Professor
Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University, USA.
Below is a short selection of excerpts received by the ABS Executive Council about Dr. Stoddard:
“Phil has had continuous extramural funding for his work (from NSF and NIH) since 1996. His work is a model of the contemporary integrative approach in animal behavior. His work integrates discoveries on the mechanisms of communication by electrosignals with functional and phylogenetic consideration of their adaptive role in the animal’s natural world.”
“Phil’s electric fish research has focused on the question “How does a communication system evolve?” He takes an integrative approach, exploring communication at every level, from the ecological forces that drive natural selection, to the proteins that constitute the structures producing communication signals. Electric fish have electric organs that generate low voltage electric field pulses (the Electric Organ Discharge or EOD). Electric fish sense the distortion of their EODs produced by nearby objects. They also vary the EODs to communicate. Because the fish shares its electric signals with the outside world and because it signals all the time to electrolocate, Phil describes them as “the only vertebrate with a public nervous system…the electric fish can reveal to an inquisitive scientist the instantaneous inner workings of its neuroendocrine systems, most components of which are extremely similar to those of all vertebrates including ourselves”. Phil takes advantage of this unique window to explore how a vertebrate translates changes in the social environment into changes in the brain and body. Not surprisingly, the nature of the social environment makes a big difference. One of the most interesting findings of Phil’s group is the discovery that electric fish have borrowed components of the neuroendocrine stress axis to regulate their EOD waveforms. When the animal encounters a stressful situation, the EOD is enhanced, raising energetic costs and making the animal more conspicuous. If the stress is a social encounter, enhancing the signal can benefit the signaler, but if the stress is caused by a predator, enhancing the signal is precisely the worse thing to do.”
“Not only is Phil one of the most outstanding researchers in integrative animal behavior, and performed major service for ABS, he has taken outreach to a whole new level. Phil served two stints on the Animal Behavior Society Executive Committee - he was Program Officer and then Treasurer. He was also a member of the Investments committee after his time as Treasurer. Since 2010, Phil has also had a parallel career as the Mayor of South Miami. Not only has he been re-elected once, but he has gained national attention as an advocate for dealing with climate change.”