Honorary Lifetime Membership Award: Robert T. Paine
The American Society of Naturalists is pleased to announce that Robert T. Paine has been named an Honorary Lifetime Member of the society. Bob received his doctorate from the University of Michigan and soon became assistant professor of zoology at the University of Washington, where he is now professor emeritus. Bob has received numerous awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, and the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists.
Bob uses elegant experiments to answer fundamental ecological questions, particularly in the area of species interactions and community structure. Bob’s research ushered in a new era, where hypotheses arising from a union of theory and natural history observations were rigorously tested in the field. His work on food web dynamics, the measurement of interaction strengths, and the role of disturbance in community diversity has stimulated legions of researchers to consider the ecological consequences of species interactions. His landmark paper “Food web complexity and species diversity,” published in the American Naturalist in 1966 (100:65–75), is an exemplar of this approach. Here Bob demonstrated that the starfish Pisaster ochraceus prefers to prey on mussels that are competitively superior to other potential prey and thus indirectly prevents the exclusion of inferior competitors and enhances species diversity. This paper has received more than 2,000 citations and is routinely among the most accessed papers published in the American Naturalist. In a later paper, “A note on trophic complexity and community stability,” published in the American Naturalist in 1969 (103:91–93), Bob proposed that starfish species such as Pisaster ochraceus and Acanthaster planci could be considered “keystone” species: “Within both these fairly or very complex systems the species composition and physical appearance were greatly modified by the activities of a single native species high in the food web. These individual populations are the keystone of the community’s structure, and the integrity of the community and its unaltered persistence through time, that is, stability, are determined by their activities and abundances” (p. 92). This idea is now broadly applied to all species interactions where a single species has major effects on the richness and composition of biological communities.
Bob has long championed the view that strong species interactions coupled with physical disturbances create dynamic communities. In collaboration with Simon Levin, Bob developed nonequilibrium models to examine the relationships between disturbance and community structure. An empirical demonstration of these ideas was presented in the paper “Disaster, catastrophe, and local persistence of the sea palm Postelsia palmaeformis” (Science [1979] 205:685–687), in which he described the population dynamics of a brown alga that colonizes wave‐swept patches of bare rock following tumultuous winter storms.
Bob’s natural history skills are legendary. Although he conducted most of his research in marine ecology, his first academic position was as ornithologist on an expedition to Chiapas, Mexico. He has maintained an interest in birds throughout his career, contributing to papers on seabird predation by peregrine falcons, wren population dynamics, and snowy owl predation of short‐eared owls. Much of Bob’s research is carried out on Tatoosh Island, located off the coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Following dangerous and exhilarating boat rides to access the rocky island, Bob introduced numerous students and colleagues to its diverse and nearly pristine marine community. The establishment and maintenance of his long‐term experiments on Tatoosh required thousands of hours of hard labor. His research is not for the faint of heart.
Through comprehensive experimental tests of ecological theory, Bob Paine has had broad and enduring influence on the field of community ecology. He thus epitomizes the goals of the American Society of Naturalists—the conceptual unification of the biological sciences.