IN MEMORIAM: FRANK MCKINNEY, 1928–2001

Abstract

Frank McKinney was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, on 23 October 1928, and died 12 June 2001, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is survived by his wife of 38 years, Meryl, and his mother, Nin. Frank received his B.A. in Zoology from Oxford (1949) and his Ph.D. from Bristol (1953) before doing a post-doctorate with future Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen at the Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge. Twelve years as Assistant Director of the Delta Waterfowl Research Station in Manitoba brought him to a new hemisphere and taught him that administration was not his calling, so he moved on to the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota in 1963, where he remained as Curator of Ethology and Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior until retiring in 2000. He enjoyed a distinguished professional career as an inspiring teacher and ground-breaking researcher. A member of the AOU since 1955, he gained recognition as an Elective Member in 1960 and a Fellow in 1975, and was awarded the Brewster Award in 1994 for his many contributions to waterfowl social behavior. He was also a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society. Frank enjoyed a worldwide reputation as the foremost authority on social behavior of dabbling ducks. He presented over 80 research talks and participated in dozens of symposia and workshops on topics ranging from wildlife management to sperm competition to the behavioral adaptations of southern hemisphere waterfowl. He was a fixture at AOU, Animal Behavior Society, International Ethological Conferences, and International Ornithological Congresses. Many of his comparative and experimental studies on ducks were conducted in special flight pens he designed and built at the Cedar Creek Natural History Area just north of the twin cities, but he also did field studies of free-living ducks in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Bahamas. Frank sought (and identified) many of the key selection pressures likely to have shaped the social behavior patterns of dabbling ducks, especially their remarkable diversity of territorial behavior, promiscuity, and parental care patterns. Due to my own fortuitous timing, I noticed that Frank actually had two major research careers. Initially trained as a classical comparative ethologist, he learned the disciplines of meticulous observation and objective description. To Frank, the behaviorist's first duty was to know the animal under study as well as possible and the only way to do that was to put in countless hours of quiet observation. There was nothing flashy, hyped, or pretentious about him. He prided himself on doing careful, indeed cautious work. During the 1950s and 1960s, Frank was oriented mainly on the macroevolutionary aspects of duck social signals and other behavior patterns, which he studied tirelessly with both captive and free-living subjects. But by the late 1960s, some of his excitement with that approach had begun to fade and Frank later admitted to me that he had gone a bit flat. So he reinvented himself. The centennial commemoration of Darwin's book on selection (Campbell 1972) set Frank off in a series of new directions. The concept now called sexual conflict (basically, recognition of the fact that males and females often have noncongruent fitness interests) immediately cast doubt on the old notion of pairbonding. Bob Trivers's unexpected proposal that the two sexes could almost be regarded as belonging to different species recast courtship as a process of mutual assessment and simultaneously sparked fresh interest on the practice of extrapair matings, consensual and otherwise, for which ducks were especially puz-