Previous articleNext article FreeHonorary Lifetime Membership Award: Ellen D. KettersonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA small, gray bird flits into view and is gone. We continue driving, or sunning in our backyard, or taking data on the behavior of our study species. What an everyday occurrence: distractedly noting the presence of a very common bird, then turning back to something we consider more important. Some organisms are so common that, paradoxically, they are easy to ignore. It takes someone with a special eye to recognize the insights that might be coaxed from something that is right in front of us and with the dedication to stay with it for years until it gradually reveals its secrets.Such an individual is Dr. Ellen Ketterson, Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University and the newest Honorary Lifetime Member of the American Society of Naturalists (ASN). This honor, limited to 12 individuals at any one time, is intended to recognize senior scientists whose distinguished research careers epitomize the goal of the ASN. New honorary members are chosen through a society-wide nomination process and selection by the ASN Executive Committee at each year’s annual meeting.Ellen received her PhD from Indiana University in 1974 and joined the faculty of its Department of Biology in 1984. She has been director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, whose mission is to develop the forecasts, strategies, and means of communication necessary to enhance resilience to environmental change, and was a founding member of the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. She is also affiliated with the Neuroscience Program, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Kinsey Institute. Ellen’s achievements have been recognized by awards from many societies. She has been the recipient of the Cooper Ornithological Society’s prestigious Miller Award for lifetime achievement in ornithological research as well as the Elliott Coues Award of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Margaret Morse Award of the Wilson Ornithological Society. She is also the recipient of the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award of the Animal Behavior Society. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Animal Behavior Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she has been a Guggenheim fellow as well.Ellen has spent much of her career studying the behavior, ecology, and evolution of a single bird species, the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). Armed with insatiable curiosity and vast patience, she and the many students whose careers she has fostered have, via long-term field and laboratory studies of this ubiquitous North American songbird, fundamentally changed our understanding of organismal biology. Work in the Ketterson lab is firmly grounded in mechanism but expands outward from there, from hormonal regulation of phenotype to long-distance movement in changing environments. Ellen has always put the whole organism front and center. Indeed, her ASN presidential address was titled “What Do Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Have in Common? The Organism in the Middle” (Ketterson 2020).Ellen’s early work, in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on migration. With her long-time collaborator and late husband, Val Nolan Jr., Ellen showed that dark-eyed juncos exhibit a strong cline in sex ratio during the winter because females migrate farther than males (Ketterson and Nolan 1976, 1983). In the 1980s she established a long-term study of breeding juncos at Mountain Lake Biological Station in southwestern Virginia. There she began her exploration of “phenotypic engineering,” the work for which she is best known today. Each year, males were implanted with testosterone (T) or blank implants early in the breeding season; various consequences of T were then measured. This led to her three most highly cited articles, all published in The American Naturalist (Ketterson et al. 1992; Ketterson and Nolan 1992, 1999). This work is the best demonstration we have that T mediates the trade-off between mating effort and parental effort and is hugely important for understanding the role of hormones in life history evolution in general (see also Casto et al. 2001; Reed et al. 2006). In the late 1990s Ellen and her collaborators initiated studies of T-implanted females. Even though most females have detectable T levels, its role had been largely neglected until these studies (Clotfelter et al. 2004; Ketterson et al. 2005; O’Neal et al. 2008). The lab subsequently extended this work to study variation in T in natural populations, studies that were again published in The American Naturalist. They showed that increased T production was related to decreased parental behavior and increased territoriality and that T production was under stabilizing selection overall (McGlothlin et al. 2007, 2010).Around the same time, Ellen started studying population differentiation in juncos in collaboration with Trevor Price, who had first described the population of juncos that colonized the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The team subsequently showed rapid evolution in behavior and morphology. Again, some of the most exciting articles reporting on this work have been published in this journal (e.g., Atwell et al. 2014).Ellen’s research continues. She and her collaborators have recently been investigating differences in physiology between residents and migrants (e.g., Fudickar et al. 2016), have expanded work in the junco to include the study of communication via odor (Whittaker et al. 2013), and have even been involved in sequencing the junco genome (Friis et al. 2022).We note that Ellen’s achievements range far beyond science. Among her extensive service contributions, she has served the ASN with great distinction, both as president in 2015 and as associate editor of The American Naturalist for many years. Throughout her career, she has been a dedicated mentor of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Finally, she has used the dark-eyed junco system to inspire students and the wider public. Through creative use of media, Ellen uses this one common songbird not only to teach principles of evolution, behavior, and ecology but also to illustrate how scientists come to know what they know. We especially encourage readers to view and to use her fine film, The Ordinary Extraordinary Junco (https://juncoproject.org/), which is freely available to the public.Considered as a whole organism, as she would no doubt like us to, Ellen Ketterson exemplifies the characteristics that the ASN holds in highest regard. She is a consummate scholar who has produced seminal insights at the intersection of behavior, ecology, and evolution. While these are the accomplishments for which we award Ellen the ASN’s highest recognition, we also hail her generosity of spirit, as exemplified by her extraordinary teaching, mentoring, outreach, and professional service.The ASN congratulates you, Ellen, on this honor. It is just one more feather in your already impressive plumage.Judith L. Bronstein, on behalf of the American Society of NaturalistsAcknowledgmentsI thank the nominators and ASN Executive Committee for their fine work during the nomination and selection process. Thanks too to Joel McGlothlin and Curt Lively for sharing their insights into Ellen Ketterson’s career and “greatest hits.”Literature CitedAtwell, J. W., G. C. Cardoso, D. J. Whittaker, T. D. Price, and E. D. Ketterson. 2014. Hormonal, behavioral, and life-history traits exhibit correlated shifts in relation to population establishment in a novel environment. American Naturalist 184:E147–E160.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarCasto, J. M., V. Nolan Jr., and E. D. Ketterson. 2001. Steroid hormones and immune function: experimental studies in wild and captive dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis). American Naturalist 157:408–420.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarClotfelter, E. D., D. M. O’Neal, J. M. Gaudioso, J. M. Casto, I. M. Parker-Renga, E. A. Snajdr, D. L. Duffy, et al. 2004. Consequences of elevating plasma testosterone in females of a socially monogamous songbird: evidence of constraints on male evolution? Hormones and Behavior 46:171–178.First citation in articleCrossref MedlineGoogle ScholarFriis, G., J. Vizueta, E. D. Ketterson, and B. Mila. 2022. A high-quality genome assembly and annotation of the dark-eyed junco Junco hyemalis, a recently diversified songbird. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics 12:jkac083.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFudickar, A. M., T. J. Greives, J. W. Atwell, C. A. Stricker, and E. D. Ketterson. 2016. Reproductive allochrony in seasonally sympatric populations maintained by differential response to photoperiod: implications for population divergence and response to climate change. American Naturalist 187:436–446.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKetterson, E. D. 2020. What do ecology, evolution, and behavior have in common? the organism in the middle. American Naturalist 196:103–118.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKetterson, E. D., and V. Nolan Jr. 1976. Geographic variation and its climatic correlates in the sex ratio of eastern-wintering dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis hyemalis). Ecology 57:679–693.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar———. 1983. The evolution of differential bird migration. Current Ornithology 1:357–393.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar———. 1992. Hormones and life histories: an integrative approach. American Naturalist 140:S33–S62.First citation in articleLinkGoogle Scholar———. 1999. Adaptation, exaptation, and constraint: a hormonal perspective. American Naturalist 154:S4–S25.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKetterson, E. D., V. Nolan Jr., and M. Sandell. 2005. Testosterone in females: mediator of adaptive traits, constraint on sexual dimorphism, or both? American Naturalist 166:S85–S98.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKetterson, E. D., V. Nolan Jr., L. Wolf, and C. Ziegenfus. 1992. Testosterone and avian life histories: effects of experimentally elevated testosterone on behavior and correlates of fitness in the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). American Naturalist 140:980–999.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarMcGlothlin, J. W., J. M. Jawor, and E. D. Ketterson. 2007. Natural variation in a testosterone-mediated trade-off between mating effort and parental effort. American Naturalist 170:864–875.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarMcGlothlin, J. W., D. J. Whittaker, S. E. Schrock, N. M. Gerlach, J. M. Jawor, E. A. Snajdr, and E. D. Ketterson. 2010. Natural selection on testosterone production in a wild songbird population. American Naturalist 175:678–701.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarO’Neal, D. M., D. G. Reichard, K. Pavilis, and E. D. Ketterson. 2008. Experimentally-elevated testosterone, female parental care, and reproductive success in a songbird, the Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis). Hormones and Behavior 54:571–578.First citation in articleCrossref MedlineGoogle ScholarReed, W. L., M. E. Clark, P. G. Parker, S. A. Raouf, N. Arguedas, D. S. Monk, E. Snajdr, et al. 2006. Physiological effects on demography: a long-term experimental study of testosterone’s effects on fitness. American Naturalist 167:667–683.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarWhittaker, D. J., N. M. Gerlach, H. A. Soini, M. V. Novotny, and E. D. Ketterson. 2013. Bird odour predicts reproductive success. Animal Behaviour 86:697–703.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The American Naturalist Volume 201, Number 3March 2023 Published for The American Society of Naturalists HistoryPublished online January 13, 2023 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.