2006 President's Award

The President's Award of the American Society of Naturalists is given to the paper that, in the president's judgment, was the best paper to appear in The American Naturalist in the preceding calendar year. The President's Award for 2006 was given to William F. Fagan, Mark Lewis, Michael G. Neubert, Craig Aumann, Jennifer L. Apple, and John G. Bishop for their article “When can herbivores slow or reverse the spread of an invading plant? a test case from Mount St. Helens” (American Naturalist 166:669–685). The authors analyze their 11‐year data set on the invasion by lupine and their moth herbivores of terrain denuded by the eruption of Mount St. Helens. They combine detailed life‐history data with long‐term surveys of spatial spread by both species and produce a model that predicts three alternative trajectories, depending on the balance between plant population growth rate and the delay before herbivore arrival. Their approach yields a quantitative prediction for growth rate/lag thresholds at which lupines will spread, be checked in stationary patches by their herbivores, or collapse, leading to the extinction of both species. These simple relationships were derived with an unusual degree of biological realism and are potentially of great general use to ecologists and managers seeking to understand invasion dynamics of pests and their consumers.

2006 Edward Osborne Wilson Naturalist Award

The Edward Osborne Wilson Naturalist Award was established in 1997 on the occasion of Professor Wilson's retirement in recognition of his lifetime of outstanding contributions in the areas of ecology and evolutionary biology, including the study of social insects, biodiversity, and biophilia. The award is given annually to an active investigator in midcareer who has made significant contributions to the knowledge of a particular ecosystem or group of organisms. The 2006 award of an honorarium and an especially appropriate work of art (see fig. 1), a drawing by George Venable of Agra eowilsoni Erwin, a carabid beetle species endemic to the Amazonian rain forest canopy, went to John T. Longino with the following presentation:

John T. Longino's gifts and accomplishments are the perfect embodiment of a naturalist‐scholar that the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award sets out to recognize. Like Ed Wilson, Jack has loved insects since boyhood, especially ants. In fact, he is fond of quoting Ed's observation that kids are all born entomologists and have to be taught not to keep loving bugs as they grow up. Jack is never more content than when he is lying on his belly, squinting intently to decipher some detail of the secret lives of ants, or sitting for hours at a time at the microscope, patiently sorting, studying, describing, drawing, or photographing pinned specimens.

Jack and his wife, Nalini Nadkarni, have long split a faculty position at the Evergreen State College. For Evergreen, they launched a course on tropical biology, Spanish, and Latin American culture, centered in Monteverde, Costa Rica, modeled on a highly successful course they had created earlier for the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Generations of Evergreen and UCSB students have come away from these courses with a deep appreciation for both natural and human diversity.

Jack and Nalini dedicate the “other half” of their time to research and writing. For nearly 15 years, that other half for Jack has been his role as Scientific Director of the Arthropods of La Selva Project (ALAS), an ecologically structured, quantitative inventory of key groups of arthropods at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica (owned and operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies). After four consecutive National Science Foundation (NSF) awards and three National Geographic grants, funding 14 years of work, the collecting phase of the project is now winding up. By any measure, ALAS has been an enormous success, with many hundred taxa new to science having reached the capable hands of more than a hundred systematist collaborators around the world. ALAS has placed an ever‐increasing collection of identified material in the collections of the Costa Rican Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio); created an invaluable synoptic research collection at La Selva; and put up an elegant, permanent web site with full details on all aspects of Project ALAS and real‐time access to the ALAS specimen database (http://purl.oclc.org/alas).

More than 200 publications, including several major monographs, have been based in part or entirely on the work of Project ALAS. Jack's own publications from the project include a major monograph on the taxonomy of Crematogaster, a large and difficult genus of ants (Longino 2003, Zootaxa 151:1–150), as well as numerous other contributions to ant taxonomy. But Jack has also produced papers on sampling and estimation methods (e.g., Longino, Coddington, and Colwell 2002, Ecology 83:689–702) that have been widely influential. Yet his labor of love has been the online ant “species pages” that he has painstakingly produced for his web site on the “Ants of Costa Rica” (http://www.evergreen.edu/ants; featured in “NetWatch,” in the February 6, 2004, issue of Science 303:739). This unique site has been highly successful and is regularly used by students and researchers throughout the Neotropics.

Jack's role in Project ALAS was always absolutely pivotal. From the start, the project would have come to nothing without Jack's intimate and ever‐evolving knowledge of tropical arthropods and of the sometimes arcane methods required to sample them quantitatively from the most complex terrestrial habitat on the planet. Jack calmly tackled the endlessly delicate business of training, encouraging, and managing a full‐time staff of four highly gifted local parataxonomists. The lack of staff turnover over more than a decade was Jack's doing.

The final phase of the project called for sampling the Barva Transect, a 35‐kilometer forested transect on rugged terrain covering nearly 3,000 meters elevation in Braulio Carrillo National Park, with La Selva at its lowland end. Access to the transect is exclusively on foot, from distant trailheads reachable only in the “dry” season (when it rains a bit less than the wetter season) by all‐terrain vehicles. In his low‐key but persuasive manner (and fluent Spanish), Jack built the necessary institutional bridges with the Costa Rican Parks Service and with local landowners whose property had to be crossed to reach the transect most efficiently. With NSF and National Geographic funding and helicopter time that Jack persuaded the local banana company to donate, ALAS built or restored a series of permanent (well, as permanent as any in such a climate) shelters at key positions along the transect. (See photos at http://purl.oclc.org/alas, the “Collections and Expeditions” tab.)

Not the staff management challenges nor the logistics of expeditions in the Barva mud nor the headaches of coordinating the mass sampling, sorting, mounting, barcoding, classifying, and entering in the database of 300,000 specimens of 15,000 species in 46 arthropod orders kept Jack from finding the time to pursue his love of the natural history of ants. In 2004, I had the pleasure of spending a week at the Cantarrana ALAS shelter (300‐meter elevation on the transect) with Jack and the ALAS collecting crew. One day I came upon Jack, but instead of lying on his belly as usual and staring down at the ground, this time he was leaning toward a steep stream bank, tangled in vegetation, picking away at the clay in a vertical stream bank with his pocketknife.

“Wanna see something cool?” asked Jack. “Look at this little cave with a tiny pedestal in the middle,” he said, pointing at a cavity the size of a walnut in the bank. The “little cave” turned out to be the visible part of the bizarre nest of a new species of the ant genus Stenamma (which Jack later described as Stenamma alas). Over the next few days, Jack not only figured out that the ants stop up the real nest entrance, in the perfect center of a “tiny pedestal,” with a specific, spherical pebble when army ants come to raid, but he also discovered that they build multiple fake nest entrances to fool the raiders. The whole story was soon published in Biotropica (Longino 2005, Biotropica 37:670–675) and was later featured as the lead story on the “Editor's Choice” page in Science (January 27, 2006, issue, 311:437).

Jack Longino is a consummate naturalist who shares with the best of them that special gift of seeing “into the life of things,” as Wordsworth put it in “Tintern Abbey.” The “deep power of joy” in Jack's face when he showed me that first nest of Stenamma alas feeds the energy that drives his life, that gives him the patience to undertake daunting projects like ALAS, the dedication to complete intricate tasks like the Crematogaster monograph, and the enthusiasm to infect generations of students with a love of science and nature.

Robert K. Colwell

University of Connecticut

2006 Sewall Wright Award

The Sewall Wright Award, which recognizes a senior‐level active researcher for significant and continuing contributions to the objectives of the American Society of Naturalists, was awarded in 2006 to Brian Charlesworth.

2006 Young Investigators' Prizes

The Young Investigators' Prizes recognize outstanding and promising work by investigators who received their doctorates in the three years preceding the application deadline or are in their final year of graduate school. Prizewinners are invited to present their work at the Young Investigators' Symposium at the annual meetings of the American Society of Naturalists. They also receive an honorarium and a travel allowance. The prizes were awarded in 2006 to Rebecca Fuller, Ryan Gregory, Patrik Nosil, and Brian Silliman.

2007 Annual Meetings of the American Society of Naturalists

The 2007 joint meetings of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists will be held in Christchurch, New Zealand, June 16–20. For more information, see the website at http://www.evolution2007.com/.

Applications for the 2007 Young Investigators' Prizes

The Young Investigators' Prizes recognize outstanding and promising work by investigators who received their doctorates in the three years preceding the application deadline or who are in their final year of graduate school. The prizes include presentation of a research paper at the annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, along with an award of $500, a travel allowance of $700, and a supplement of $500 in case of international travel. The prize committee requests applications for the 2007 prizes from anyone supporting the objectives of the Society. Suggested names and addresses of people who should be encouraged to apply are also welcome. Applications consist of no more than three pages (excluding tables, figures, and references) that summarize the applicant's work, no more than four appropriate reprints, a curriculum vitae, and two letters from individuals familiar with the applicant's work. Four copies of the application materials should be sent by January 31, 2007, to the Prize Committee, c/o Dr. Mark D. Bertness, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912 (e‐mail: [email protected]).

Nominations for the 2007 Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award

In recognition of the lifetime of outstanding contributions of Professor E. O. Wilson in the areas of ecology and evolutionary biology, this award was established in the year of Professor Wilson's retirement from Harvard University. The E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award is given to an active investigator in midcareer who has made significant contributions to the knowledge of a particular ecosystem or group of organisms. Individuals whose research and writing illuminate principles of evolutionary biology and an enhanced aesthetic appreciation of natural history will merit special consideration. The award will consist of an especially appropriate work of art and a prize of $2,000, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists. For the 2007 E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award, three copies of the nomination packet, each of which must include a letter of nomination, curriculum vitae including a publication list, and three key publications, should be sent by March 1, 2007, to the Award Committee, c/o Dr. Nicholas J. Gotelli, Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Marsh Life Science Building, Burlington, Vermont 05405‐2914 (e‐mail: [email protected]).