ENHS Nature Trails March 2005 Article 1

This month's speaker: Andy Brower

Butterflies are passionate about flowers, and this month's speaker, Dr. Andy Brower, is passionate about butterflies. He holds the Harold and Leona Rice Chair of Systematic Entomology at Oregon State University. (An interesting endowment-more on page 7.) Dr. Brower accepted this position at OSU in 1997, based on his personal and career commitment: "The next fifty years will be the most critical period in history for understanding and preserving biodiversity, and it is essential to strengthen our commitment to systematic research now. Together with Professor Darlene Judd" (a systematic entomologist specializing in flies -and Dr. Brower's wife), "and colleagues in the Botany and Zoology departments, we are looking forward to developing one of the best training programs in the U.S." Aside from his research and teaching responsibilities, Dr. Brower contributes to OSU's extensive insect collection. It includes butterflies from the Pacific Northwest and around the world, as well as offers important holdings of beetles, wasps, flies and other groups. With more than 2.5 million insects, it is one of the ten largest insect collections held by universities in the United States and is the largest insect collection in the Northwest.

Sometimes Dr. Brower pursues another interest in the field besides butterflies. I'll let you find out by reading what he has to say about himself:

"I first became interested in butterflies at a very young age because my parents, Jane and Lincoln Brower, were professional butterfly biologists. My mom was the first person to experimentally demonstrate that the viceroy butterfly is a mimic of the monarch. My dad, who is pretty famous as "Mr. Monarch" these days, actually started his career working on hybrid zones in tiger swallowtail butterflies, and he jumped on the monarch bandwagon after my mom's success.

"Some of my earliest memories are from field trips my parents took to Trinidad, West Indies, to study mimicry in Heliconius and other tropical butterflies. I made my first butterfly collection there at the age of five. I think the idea of mimicry has fascinated me ever since. I have returned many times to Trinidad and the neotropics, including Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, French Guiana and the Dominican Republic in pursuit of butterflies. Though I always enjoyed collecting insects on these trips, as well as at home, since I have become a professional entomologist, I have not maintained a personal collection. When I collect insects, I deposit them in a public institution where they will be useful for researchers in perpetuity.

"As a college student I had the opportunity to work as a curatorial fellow in the Yale Peabody Museum. I became very interested in working with butterflies and thought a good graduate school project might be to study geographical variation in mimetic butterflies of the Indonesian Archipelago. When I got to graduate school at Cornell, my advisor convinced me that that was an overly ambitious project and would be impossible, so I should look for something closer to home. I thought about working on population structure of fishes for awhile, but really, I was always drawn back to butterflies. When I saw the Futuyma and Slatkin "Coevolution" book with a plate of mimetic Heliconius on the cover, I knew what I was going to do my thesis on. Then it was just a matter of getting the specimens, which involved a lot of grant writing and travel to some of the aforementioned places.

"I have lived, worked and pursued my other interests in Corvallis since accepting my position at OSU. I enjoy riding and raising sport horses. My wife and I currently have eight. " (This is not just an idle hobby for Dr. Brower, he and his horse Maestro qualified for the Oregon Dressage Championships in 2004.)

Andy earned both his BA and MES in biology from Yale prior to graduate school at Cornell. His list of publications is long and his honors numerous; most recently he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and was appointed Associate Editor for the Journal Systematic Biology, one of the premier journals in the field. His enthusiasm for educating others shows in the website he maintains, "Butterfly Net International," a website primarily for the professional entomologist. (See the note on p. 7 for a website for all ages and interests, as well as the serious butterfly hobbyist.) Dr. Brower's current research includes "the molecular systematics of Ithomiiini and Satyrinae, two additional groups of butterflies." He is also part of a collaboration "on trying to build a phylogenetic tree for all the butterflies in the world."

WHAT WILL WE HEAR ABOUT FRIDAY NIGHT?

"Mimicry in butterflies. Geographical variation, mimicry rings, *Batesian versus *Muellerian mimicry. Hopefully it will be intelligible, and will certainly have some nice pictures (mostly not taken by me, however!)"

*We can get a head start on Andy's talk by understanding the difference between these two behaviors. The glossary in my Butterflies of North America by James A. Scott, makes it easy: Batesian mimicry refers to an edible species mimicking a poisonous species. Muellerian mimicry refers to a poisonous species mimicking another poisonous species. Both entries suggest one should also understand convergence in the context of mimicry: "The development of a resemblance between two species that are not close genealogical relatives."

Over 5,000 cases of mimicry have been scientifically documented in plants and animals since 1800, primarily for protective reasons according to Stanislav Komárek in his compendious bibliography on mimicry. My mind wanders to mimicry in humans: We don't seem to mimic for protection, but for attention and selection.-editor

Enthusiasm for insects is not limited to professional entomologists. Harold Rice, a Springfield filbert grower, has been an amateur entomologist for more than 50 years. He has found species of butterflies never seen before in Oregon and rediscovered others thought extinct; some subspecies have even been named after him.

But the main work for Harold and his wife Leona has been their filbert orchards, for which Oregon State University provided ongoing consultation through its Extension services. In 1995, the couple expressed appreciation by donating 16 acres of their land to the OSU Foundation, the sale of which established the Harold E. and Leona M. Rice Professorship in Systematic Entomology. (The Department of Entomology is a joint department of the College of Agricultural Sciences and the College of Science.) The Rice gift is intended to promote science through research and teaching activities by an entomologist educated in Systematic Entomology (systematics is the study of the evolution and classification of animals and plants). Funds from the gift endow a professorship which enhances the curation of the OSU entomology collection; with more than 2.5 million insects, it is the largest insect collection in the Northwest.

"I've been interested in entomology since I started collecting butterflies when I was a kid," says Harold Rice. "I've always wished I could do something like this for the field of entomology." Andrew Brower's research focuses on discovering the branching pattern of the evolutionary tree of butterflies. After earning his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1994, Dr. Brower was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for study at the American Museum of Natural History. Subsequently, he received a second fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, a post he held until being named the Harold E. and Leona M. Rice Professor in Systematic Entomology in 1997.

"Although people have been collecting and studying butterflies for hundreds of years, their systematic relationships to one another remain poorly understood," says Dr. Brower."I greatly appreciate the collecting efforts of Harold Rice and other dedicated amateurs."

Part of what attracted Dr. Brower to OSU is its renewed interest in the field of biological systematics-the study of the evolutionary relationships of different groups of organisms. Dr. Brower was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, and was appointed Associate Editor for the Journal Systematic Biology, one of the premier journals in the field.

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