Fly on the Wall

Abstract

Although I’m often asked to participate in panel discussions for various groups promoting women in science, I tend to be a disappointment to the organizers. By great good fortune, or else total obliviousness on my part, I’ve never felt discriminated against in any professional context based on the fact that I possess two X chromosomes. Accordingly, I have no horror stories to share and can’t really offer any hard-earned insights on overcoming barriers, which I evidently either avoided completely by happenstance or stumbled over without realizing they were there. (In the interests of complete disclosure, though, there was an awkward moment in graduate school when, at a dinner party hosted by Paul Feeny, my major professor, his guest, Dennis Leston, an authority on the ants of West Africa and the Congo Basin, boozily leaned over and whispered to me that I was “attractive if a bit thick in the middle.” At the time my feelings were hurt, but in retrospect I suppose I should have expected a myrmecologist to prefer waspwaisted women.) This is not to say that I haven’t missed out on some things by virtue of being female. One example came to light recently. This past summer my colleague and longtime collaborator Arthur Zangerl took a 7-week trip to Europe in search of wild parsnips, Pastinaca sativa, and parsnip webworms, Depressaria pastinacella (Duponchel). Both species are native to Europe, so, after studying the interaction throughout the midwestern United States for more than 20 years (Berenbaum and Zangerl 2003) (well, mostly in Urbana, Charleston, and Peotone, Ill.), we decided to expand our horizons and investigate the interaction where it originated. Art brought back hundreds of samples, dozens of digital images, Fly on the Wall