2005 Sewall Wright Award

Abstract

Next article Free2005 Sewall Wright Award Robert E. RicklefsMichael TurelliMichael TurelliUniversity of California, Davis Search for more articles by this author University of California, DavisPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Sewall Wright Award recognizes a midcareer or senior‐level researcher for significant and continuing contributions to the major objective of the American Society of Naturalists, the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. The 2005 awardee, Robert E. Ricklefs, Curators’ Professor of Biology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, meets these criteria especially well. Ricklefs is exceptional for the tremendous breadth of his interests, having made major contributions to the physiology of growth and development, the evolutionary biology of aging, the role of parasites in life histories, community ecology, historical biogeography, and phylogenetically informed analyses of macroevolutionary patterns. The breadth of his interests is paralleled by the diversity of taxa he has studied. Trained as an ornithologist, Ricklefs also works extensively on plants, especially trees, and various parasites. He has used this breadth of knowledge to stimulate new areas of research, including the evolution of life histories in birds and the application of phylogenies to community ecology. He has been publishing for more than 30 years and continues to be highly prolific, creative, and influential, regularly employing new analytical and methodological techniques to address questions that were often originally formulated by him. He is also the author of two highly regarded ecology textbooks, Ecology, which is now in its fourth edition, and The Economy of Nature, now in its fifth edition.Ricklefs’s early comparative analyses of growth and development in both precocial and altricial birds are now the classic studies of those subjects. His continuing series of papers on the life histories of birds in relation to their demography has led to several generalizations about their evolution at broad geographic scales. For example, he has documented that passerines in North America tend to produce more fledglings in temperate than in tropical regions and that adult survival has the opposite trend, yet the survival of fledglings through their first year apparently does not vary geographically in a predictable way. This work continues with an ongoing collaboration that compares metabolic rates in tropical and temperate bird species. He has been particularly interested in emphasizing the roles of parasites in limiting bird distributions and affecting life histories, and a whole suite of papers on the impact and history of avian malaria has recently appeared.Ricklefs has also been at the forefront of putting history back into community ecology ever since his widely quoted 1987 paper in Science. He used comparisons among regions to demonstrate remarkable examples in which communities have failed to converge, thus showing that community structure cannot be entirely attributed to local processes such as competition. He has made this demonstration for birds and plants across continental and island scales and has coedited a book on the subject that is widely cited. He was aware of the potential of molecular phylogenies to address history in community ecology long before the methods became readily available, outlining a program of research in Endler and Otte’s 1989 book Speciation and Its Consequences, and he has been quick to take up the challenge now that such phylogenies are relatively easy to obtain. A good example is his recent massive project with Eldredge Bermingham to estimate phylogenetic relationships among West Indian bird species and populations. This work has been used to revisit (among other things) E. O. Wilson’s concept of the taxon cycle, whereby species undergo alternating periods of range expansion and contraction. The taxon cycle was described for West Indian birds by Ricklefs and Cox more than 30 years ago. Although the causes of such cycles are unclear, recent data from Ricklefs and his collaborators on genetic differentiation of bird populations in the Lesser Antilles support the idea that a species in the expansion phase has less phenotypic and genetic differentiation than one in a contraction phase. In addition, a series of recent papers has investigated patterns of morphological diversification and speciation among birds more generally; one interesting result indicates a connection between morphological evolution and speciation. Ricklefs’s work is stimulating others to tackle these and other long‐standing questions about evolutionary ecology, to try to dissect the intricacies of the balance between processes that promote diversification and those that constrain it. He is a synthetic population biologist in the best tradition of the American Society of Naturalists. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The American Naturalist Volume 167, Number 1January 2006 Published for The American Society of Naturalists Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/498280 Views: 277Total views on this site All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.