Memorial
Jack P. Hailman (1936-2016)
By H. Jane Brockmann and Donald A. Dewsbury
Jack Hailman was a mainstay of the ABS for many years. In addition to enlivening the annual meetings (e.g. by writing Animal Misbehaviour) he served as Executive Editor of Animal Behaviour (1972-1978) and as President (1981-1982). Among other positions, he served on the Education Committee, the Animal Care Committee and the Applied Animal Behavior Committee. Jack was elected a fellow of ABS in 1984 and was awarded the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award in 1998. He received similar awards from other organizations.
Jack Hailman was born May 6, 1936 in St. Louis, MO and grew up in Bethesda, MD, where his future roles were foreshadowed as an eagle scout, the president of his high school class, and an avid birder. Jack received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1959 where E. O. Wilson was his advisor. He served as the president of the Harvard Ornithological Club and edited its newsletter. Upon graduation he married his high school sweetheart, Elizabeth B. Davis. He was also commissioned into the Navy in 1959, where he served for three years.
Jack continued his education at Duke University under the direction of Peter Klopfer, studying the development of behavior in gull chicks and receiving his Ph.D. in 1964. He then accepted a post-doctoral fellowship in Tübingen, Germany followed by one at the Institute for Animal Behavior at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ. In 1966 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Maryland and in 1969 he moved to the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his academic career. He retired in 1998 as Professor Emeritus and moved to Jupiter, FL.
Jack was fascinated by a wide range of problems in animal behavior but especially visual and auditory communication and coding. He wrote many papers and two books on the topic including Coding and Redundancy: Man-Made and Animal-Evolved Signals (2008, Harvard University Press) and Optical Signals: Animal Communication and Light (1977, Indiana University Press). Perhaps his best known single study entailed unraveling the developmental complexity of the behavior of laughing gull chicks pecking at the red spots on their parents’ bills in order to be fed. The work was cleverly titled “The Ontogeny of an Instinct” (1987) and “How an Instinct is Leaned” (1969).
During his 32 years as a professor, Jack mentored many undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students and taught a number of courses including animal behavior, graduate animal behavior seminars, and introductory biology. His students particularly remember the many evening seminars at his home where Jack taught critical thinking, scientific epistemology, history of science and logic (e.g. the Wff ‘n Proof game), as well as more conventional subjects like the evolution of behavior. HJB recalls a particularly interesting undergraduate field course that he led to Florida over spring break, Field Biology of the Southeast. Together with his mentor Peter Klopfer, Jack wrote the textbook An Introduction to Animal Behavior: Ethology’s First Century (1967, Prentice Hall). He put enormous thought into his teaching, preparing detailed handouts on all aspects of behavioral and field research. Much of this information was pulled together into the book, Planning, Proposing and Presenting Science Effectively which he co-authored with a fellow faculty member at Wisconsin, Karen Strier (2006, Cambridge University Press). Jack was especially effective at encouraging students to publish their observations and ideas and he co-authored a number of papers with them. He particularly valued detailed, quantitative description that could be used in comparative studies. He encouraged his students to be creative, to develop collaborations and to defend their ideas.
Jack was equally popular and respected by his colleagues. He seemed genuinely interested in their work and was supportive of a range of approaches. DAD recalls numerous such interactions about science and at ABS executive committee meetings. At a meeting in Tallahassee, Jack invited him and S. J. Gould to join his family for a cookout at his campsite; both the atmosphere and discussion were memorable. He was an equally gracious host at his home in Jupiter; DAD recalls one visit featuring both lively discussions and a birding walk. Jack was a naturalist and a keen observer of the natural world; he greatly enjoyed being in the field, always with notebook in hand, always thinking about what he was seeing and hearing. Among his works were Backpacking Wisconsin (2000) and Hiking Circuits in Rocky Mountain National Park (2003), both written jointly with Liz.
In 1996 Jack began his long association with the Archbold Biological Station studying Florida scrub jays in collaboration with Glenn Woolfenden and others, helping with the monthly jay censuses. In his retirement Jack continued to serve in leadership roles in his new community and for his new and ongoing interests. He edited the newsletter for the Florida Trail Association and worked to maintain their trails. He also conducted monthly biological surveys at the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area cataloguing the plants and animals and developing an on-line photo identification database for the area. For his exceptional efforts, he received the 2014 Bureau of Land Management National Volunteer Award.
Surrounded by family, Jack Hailman died of lung disease in Jupiter Colony, FL on January 20, 2016. He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Elizabeth Hailman, two sons, Karl Andrew Hailman (Hope Kiefer) of Madison, WI, and Eric Peter Hailman (Susan Hailman) of Lexington, MA, and five grandchildren.
The ABS laments the passing of Jack Hailman and extends sympathies to his family, colleagues and friends.
Charles C. Carpenter, Ph.D.
By James C. Gillingham
Herpetologist, animal behaviorist and naturalist, Charles C. Carpenter (Chuck), died January 10, 2016. He was born June 2, 1921 in Denison, Iowa, but grew up on the shores of Lake Superior in Marquette, Michigan. After receiving his B.A. degree at Northern Michigan College of Education (now Northern Michigan University) in 1943, he entered the Army Medical Corps. Following the war, he received his M.S. in 1947 and PhD in 1951, both from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He joined the faculty of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma in 1952 and remained there until his retirement in 1987.
Chuck was a world renowned herpetologist. His 1952 monograph on the comparative ecology of three species of garter snakes is still cited today as a solid example of excellent qualitative and quantitative field work and set the stage for future work in snake ecology. He was a meticulous observer of the natural world and kept detailed field notes on these observations. Chuck firmly believed that these observations deserved dissemination to the scientific community, and so most of this information was published. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for subsequent, perhaps more quantitative work on those species.
First and foremost, Chuck was an animal behaviorist. He adhered to the use of the “ethogram” to initially document the behavioral array of a given species so future, more detailed questions, could be asked and answered. Beginning in the early 1960s he and his students introduced biologists to the concept of the lizard “display action pattern” and its quantitative representation in the “DAP Graph”. This gave animal behaviorists a way to quantify visual communication in lizards and this is still being used today. Chuck soon applied this technique to the lizards of the Galapagos Islands as well as to species in southwestern North America. Further, by utilizing zoo collections these data were used to make comparisons on a worldwide basis. By 1977, due in large part to his prominence in the area of reptilian behavior, he coauthored a chapter on the variation and evolution of stereotyped reptilian behavior, published in the significant series entitled “The Biology of the Reptilia” (1977). Chuck’s publication list of almost 150 papers in animal behavior and herpetology continued well into his retirement.
“Doc” Carpenter, as he was known to his students, was a genuine naturalist who fully understood and appreciated the interaction and importance of all living things…not just the organisms with which he was most familiar. As a mentor, he was able to convey this to all his students, not only through formal classroom education, but also through his informal impromptu quizzing and word games on trips into the field. The best of these field trips were the annual spring break “safaris” to various corners of North America in search of reptiles and amphibians where Doc Carpenter would shine like the true naturalist he was. He punctuated long periods of hard field work with breaks to drink a “prairie cocktail” (cold water) or inquire as to the identity of some critter bones he had just found. Evenings were filled with tales of his youth, and the philosophy of why one should live by the “3 Ps”: Patience, Persistence and Perseverance. Field work with his students always gave him genuine delight!
Through his entire career, Chuck was an active member of a number of societies. He was a charter member of the following societies: Ecological Society of America, Southwestern Association of Naturalists, Oklahoma Herpetological Society, and Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles. He was a founder and fellow of the ABS, as well as secretary of the Executive Committee from 1966-68. Chuck Carpenter was the Curator of Herpetology at the University of Oklahoma’s Stovall Museum of Natural History (now the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History) from 1953-1987 and Curator Emeritus at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History since his retirement in 1987.
Chuck had a strong interest in history, in particular the role of biologists and their contributions to the current state of our knowledge. In addition to his publishing several individual accounts on early North American naturalists, he completed a paper on “Early Oklahoma Naturalists and Collectors” in 2000. Prior to that he published “The Centennial History of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma” (1992).
Although Chuck was unable to read music, he could play piano, guitar and accordion. He had a great singing voice and loved to sing and dance. He enjoyed painting and was an accomplished poet. His 1939 “Ode to a Toad” has always been a favorite of his family and students.
The ABS laments the passing of Charles C. Carpenter and extends sympathies to his family, colleagues and friends.