In Memoriam: Martin Humphrey Moynihan, 1928-1996

Autor: Neal Griffith Smith
Rok vydání: 1998
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Auk. 115:755-758
ISSN: 1938-4254
0004-8038
DOI: 10.2307/4089423
Popis: Martin Moynihan died of lung cancer on 3 December 1996 at a hospital near his farm at Albi, France. He was a former director of the Canal Zone Biological Area/ Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and one of the most influential figures in behavioral evolutionary biology, particularly with tropical organisms. He joined the AOU in 1954, became an Elective Member in 1959, and a Fellow in 1966. Martin was born on 5 February 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. As a youth he traveled widely in Europe with his mother and considered French his co-native tongue. His secondary education was at Horace Mann School in New York City, where at 15 he became interested in birds at the American Museum of Natural History and within two years had met Ernst Mayr, the pivotal figure in his development. Mayr took on Martin and the result was his first paper at age 18. Martin's undergraduate career at Princeton was interrupted by army service in Korea, but he graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1950. He wanted to work with David Lack at Oxford, but events transpired so that he entered the behavior group under Niko Tinbergen. Martin told me that Lack was away at the time, that he himself couldn't "see the damn tits in the woods, and that gulls were big and easy." Indeed! That was the blossoming period of European ethology. Martin's fellow researchers included Desmond Morris, David Blest, and Aubrey Manning to mention but a few who rose to stardom in some aspect of behavioral research. But Martin was different. His all-consuming interest was in evolution. Princeton gave him a strong background in paleontology, which almost all behaviorists and ecologists lacked. He was always a three-dimensional thinker. His bibliography shows that he dealt with the hot questions of the day at Oxford: drives, ritualization and causation all received his attention, through the gulls. From the first gull papers came his highly distinctive, boldly original, black-and-white ink depictions of displays that were as much a Moynihan trademark as were the original ideas expressed in his papers (see Figs. 1 and 2). All of Moynihan's books and papers are full of these wonderfully strange representations of form and flow of behavior in birds, primates, and cephalopods! After Oxford, Martin entered into a series of postdoctorals which, while based at Harvard and Cornell, allowed him to travel and pull the gull business together, which he did in his revision of the Laridae. Ernst Mayr, Charles Sibley, and Eugene Eisenmann were his friends and advisers. All three claimed to have been solely responsible for the Smithsonian's hiring of that young behaviorist as Resident Naturalist of Barro Colorado Island in the then Canal Zone of the Republic of Panama. A bright Tinbergen-trained ethologist who understood the New Systematics and evolutionary biology could scarcely be overlooked. At the time, he was probably unique. Barro Colorado, a forested island in the midst of the Panama Canal was, in 1957, a sort of tropical Arcadia. It had been made famous by the semipopular writings of Frank Chapman. Good research had been done there: Chapman's own research on manakin leks was, like much of his work, well ahead of the time. Carpenter's work on howler monkeys and Schnerla's studies on army ants were also firsts. But when the Smithsonian took over Barro Colorado in 1946, it rather languished despite a number of bird and mammal life histories. That changed with Martin Moynihan's arrival in what he loved to call "the green hell." And I will argue that the whole scheme of what was to become "tropical biology" was set onto a
Databáze: OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz: