ENHS Nature Trails May 99 Article 1

This month's speaker: George Carroll, in his own words

Nature Trails asked our speaker to provide some background to his talk:

I was raised as the only child of people who were themselves only a generation removed from mid-western farms and for whom gardening and horticulture were serious life-long diversions. Thus, by the age of six (roughly when I found my first morel) I was thoroughly imprinted on living organisms in general and plants in particular. From high school on I have always pursued some botanical or horticultural project, and since coming to live in Oregon have brought something over an acre at our home in Eugene under intense cultivation for fruit, vegetables, and flowers. From 1980 until 1994 our family (wife Fanny and two daughters Emily and Eileen) grew, cut, and sold mixed bouquets of flowers at the Saturday Market in Eugene.

My father was a chemist, specializing in the industrial use of radioisotopes in an era before radiation safety was taken seriously. My calling as a scientist was never seriously in doubt, but was certainly strengthened as a high school student at Westtown Friends School near Philadelphia, where I received a superlative education. I entered Swarthmore College convinced (or rather convinced by my parents) that I should become a physician. A botanical epiphany occurred during my sophomore year at Swarthmore when I took my first course in vascular plant systematics with Bill Denison (now retired from the Botany and Plant Pathology Department at Oregon State University). Any doubt that life as something other than a physician might be possible evaporated during a memorable spring break field trip to Florida at a time when it was still a biological paradise.

Participation in an undergraduate research program at Cornell University under Bill's supervision the following summer sealed my fate as a mycologist, and I participated in an extended trip to collect fungi in Costa Rica with Bill and other Swarthmore students in the summer after I graduated from college. That fall I left for Copenhagen, where I spent a year studying the classification of a very large and important group of Ascomycetes known (now colloquially) as Pyrenomycetes under the tutelage of Morton Lange at the Institut for Sporeplanter and the Danish Pyrenomycete specialist Anders Munk. I returned from Denmark to take up graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, which had just purchased for themselves an eminent botany department, including my major professor C. J. Alexopoulos. I spent three years at UT Austin, completing a degree on the ultrastructure of ascospore formation in the Ascomycetes. I moved directly from Austin to a position as Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon in January 1967.

During my years at Oregon I have been broadly interested in fungal systematics, evolution, and ecology. From 1975-1982 I participated in a research program centered at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to look at the role of canopy fungi and lichens in nutrient cycling in old-growth Douglas fir forests. My first graduate student, Mary Bernstein (née Averill) discovered that perfectly healthy needles of Douglas fir harbor asymptomatic fungal infections, now termed fungal endophytes. This discovery has eventually triggered a flood of studies, still continuing, on the incidence and importance of these fungi - studies with relevance for biodiversity prospecting, plant quarantine regulations, natural mechanisms for the regulation of plant herbivores, and understandings about the evolution of complex life cycles in host-specific Ascomycetes. Fanny and I spent 15 months in Japan about 10 years ago while I attempted to establish a causal relation between the occurrence and decline of gall midges on Japanese cedar and the presence of needle endophytes.

Two years ago Fanny and I returned from a 15-month sabbatical leave in South Africa, where I worked at a forest pathology institute in Bloemfontein. While in South Africa I learned techniques for obtaining DNA sequence data from fungi and tried to answer the question whether rare plants (in this case cycads) harbor rare fungi and whether there is evidence for parallel evolution between fungal endophytes and their hosts. I will not be discussing this work during my ENHS presentation, but rather will provide a visual introduction to the stunning biological and physical landscapes present in southern Africa. I am too near-sighted ever to have been much interested in birds. However, Fanny and I found the birds in South Africa to be too flamboyant to ignore. Of course we have slides of the large mammal and plant life as well, and I look forward to sharing them with the Natural History Society.

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