OUP accepted manuscript

Abstract

Born in the backwoods of rural Mississippi to an illiterate sharecropper, W. Joe Lewis graduated from Mississippi State University at the age of twenty-four with a Ph.D. in entomology. He immediately accepted a research position with the USDA–Agricultural Research Service, which resulted in a forty-year career, culminating with the highest professional grade for a USDA scientist, acknowledging his meritorious service. During those four decades, he also held joint faculty appointments with the University of Georgia and University of Florida. Lewis earned three degrees in entomology from Mississippi State University within a rapid span of seven years (B.S., 1964; M.S., 1965; Ph.D., 1967). His USDA career had numerous research firsts: isolation and identification of the kairomones for larval and egg parasitoids; demonstration of a parasitoid to use kairomones to enhance its searching ability in the field; development of a laboratory system for oriented in-flight behavioral studies of parasitoids; demonstration of the key role that associative learning plays in parasitoid responses to chemical and/or visual host cues; discovery that plants, in response to herbivore feeding damage, can actively emit information-rich chemical distress signals that are used by a parasitoid to locate and attack the herbivore; and demonstration that plant signals can be herbivore-specific and selectively used by parasitoids. Additionally, Lewis led the formulation and successful demonstration, using cotton production as a model, of the economic and environmental benefits of a fundamental shift to a total system approach to sustainable pest management.