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Philip J. DeVries | |
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Alma mater | University of Michigan |
Spouse | Carla Penz (1997-present) |
Awards | Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship at The Natural History Museum (UK, 1982-1983) University of Texas Predoctoral Fellowship (1984-1985) Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship (1985-1986) Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship (1987-1988) John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1988-1993) Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship (1993-1994) Honorable mention, Rolex Awards for Enterprise (1993) John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1996-1998) Biotropica Award for Excellence in Tropical Biology (2001) Elected one of 125 extraordinary University of Texas graduates (2010) Fulbright Program, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil (2015) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Biologist |
Institutions | University of New Orleans |
Philip James DeVries (born March 7, 1952) is a tropical biologist whose research focuses on insect ecology and evolution, especially butterflies. His best-known work includes symbioses between caterpillars, ants and plants, and community level biodiversity of rainforest butterflies. DeVries is Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans, Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History (NY), Florida Museum of Natural History (FL), and The Milwaukee Public Museum (WI).
DeVries was born in Detroit, Michigan to Henry William DeVries and Helen Mary DeVries (née Brnabic). His early interest in Biology was nourished by close contact with nature during his childhood in rural Michigan. As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, DeVries was mentored in botany by professor Warren H. Wagner Jr., known among colleagues as "Herb". In 1975, DeVries received a Bachelor's degree from the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, with emphasis in botany. His early exposure to systematic botany continued to be useful in his career.
From 1975 to 1980, he was a curator of Lepidoptera at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica as a Peace Corps volunteer where he built the country's first major butterfly collection. DeVries traveled widely in Costa Rica, collecting and making observations on butterflies. This eventually provided a large body of information that formed the basis for his two volumes entitled "The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History" (vol. 1 and 2). In Costa Rica, he interacted with many field biologists, including Daniel Janzen, Stephen P. Hubbell, Alwyn Gentry, Robin B. Foster, Lawrence E. Gilbert, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Russell Lande.
DeVries attended the University of Texas at Austin from 1980 to 1987, where he earned a PhD in Zoology. His doctoral work focused on the widespread symbioses between butterfly caterpillars, ants and plants, which he popularized under the nickname "Singing caterpillars". In 1982, DeVries received a fellowship from the Fulbright Program to visit The Natural History Museum in London (then British Museum of Natural History), where he spent a year preparing the first volume of his "The Butterflies of Costa Rica" book. There, he collaborated with Bernard d'Abrera and other curators and visitors deeply rooted in the history of butterfly biology, evolution and systematics.
In 1988, DeVries received a MacArthur Fellowship that allowed him to travel broadly in pursuit of tropical biology in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Argentina. Through the MacArthur Fellows Program, he became close friends with the artists Lee Friedlander, Steve Lacy, John T. Scott, Brad Leithauser, and the historian Cornell Fleischer.
He was a pre-doctoral (1985–1986) and post-doctoral fellow (1987–1988) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, UK (1990–1991), an associate of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University (1990–1992), and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow at Harvard University (1993–1994). He is a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History, Missouri Botanical Gardens, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Among other countries, DeVries has done field research in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Bhutan, Australia, Borneo, Malaysia.
DeVries was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon (1994–2000), where he developed trapping methods to accrue long-term data sets on tropical butterfly communities. Work with his colleague Russell Lande produced some of the first rigorous insights into the spatial and temporal dynamics of diverse rainforest insect communities. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Director of the Center for Biodiversity Studies and curator of Lepidoptera at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.
He is presently a professor at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana, along with his wife and close colleague Carla Penz. DeVries continues to study long-term butterfly community diversity, and speciation. His butterfly trapping methods are used widely in tropical diversity studies and conservation efforts. He also continues work on evolution of butterfly-ant symbioses.
Recent honors include: in 2010, DeVries was elected one of 125 extraordinary University of Texas ex-graduates for the university's 125th anniversary; in 2012, the main-belt minor planet 89131 Phildevries was named in DeVries' honor by astronomer Bill Yeung. [1]
This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(September 2022) |
DeVries discovered the substrate-borne calls produced by caterpillars that form symbioses with ants in the butterfly families Riodinidae and Lycaenidae. In these symbioses, ants provide protection against arthropod predators in exchange for food secretions. DeVries demonstrated experimentally that the calls produced by singing caterpillars function to enhance caterpillar-ant symbioses in concert with caterpillar glands that produce food and chemical secretions. He also has shown that singing caterpillars occur widely throughout the world. His studies were the first to show that acoustical calls of one insect species can evolve to attract unrelated species in the context of symbiotic associations, fitting into a field of biological science termed Bioacoustics. Documentation and examination of interactions between organisms of different species integrate the fields of natural history, ecology, and evolution.
For decades, DeVries was involved with natural history documentary films as a writer, scientific advisor and on-camera presenter for production companies such as National Geographic, Partridge Films, Oxford Scientific Films, and Granada. Fifteen of these documentaries have been televised globally by National Geographic Channel, BBC Television and Scientific American Frontiers.[ citation needed ]
Books
Butterflies are winged insects from the lepidopteran suborder Rhopalocera, characterized by large, often brightly coloured wings that often fold together when at rest, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the superfamilies Hedyloidea and Papilionoidea. The oldest butterfly fossils have been dated to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago, though they likely originated in the Late Cretaceous, about 101 million years ago.
Lepidoptera or lepidopterans is an order of winged insects which includes butterflies and moths. About 180,000 species of the Lepidoptera have been described, representing 10% of the total described species of living organisms, making it the second largest insect order with 126 families and 46 superfamilies, and one of the most widespread and widely recognizable insect orders in the world.
Paraponera clavata, commonly known as the bullet ant, is a species of ant known for its extremely painful sting. It inhabits humid lowland rainforests in Central and South America.
Lycaenidae is the second-largest family of butterflies, with over 6,000 species worldwide, whose members are also called gossamer-winged butterflies. They constitute about 30% of the known butterfly species.
Riodinidae is the family of metalmark butterflies. The common name "metalmarks" refers to the small, metallic-looking spots commonly found on their wings. The 1,532 species are placed in 146 genera. Although mostly Neotropical in distribution, the family is also represented both in the Nearctic, Palearctic, Australasian (Dicallaneura), Afrotropic, and Indomalayan realms.
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
The wildlife of Costa Rica comprises all naturally occurring animals, fungi and plants that reside in this Central American country. Costa Rica supports an enormous variety of wildlife, due in large part to its geographic position between North and South America, its neotropical climate, and its wide variety of habitats. Costa Rica is home to more than 500,000 species, which represent nearly 5% of the species estimated worldwide, making Costa Rica one of the 20 countries with the highest biodiversity in the world. Of these 500,000 species, a little more than 300,000 are insects.
Myrmecophily consists of positive, mutualistic, interspecies associations between ants and a variety of other organisms, such as plants, other arthropods, and fungi. It may also include commensal or even parasitic interactions.
Miletinae is a subfamily of the family Lycaenidae of butterflies, commonly called harvesters and woolly legs, and virtually unique among butterflies in having predatory larvae. Miletinae are entirely aphytophagous. The ecology of the Miletinae is little understood, but adults and larvae live in association with ants, and most known species feed on Hemiptera, though some, like Liphyra, feed on the ants themselves. The butterflies, ants, and hemipterans, in some cases, seem to have complex symbiotic relationships benefiting all.
Naomi E. Pierce is an American entomologist and evolutionary biologist who studies plant-herbivore coevolution and is a world authority on butterflies.
Julián Monge-Nájera is a Costa Rican ecologist, scientific editor, educator and photographer. He has done research with the following institutions: Universidad de Costa Rica, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and Universidad Estatal a Distancia. His scientific work has been featured by The New York Times; National Geographic; the BBC; Wired; IFLoveScience; The Independent (London) and Reader's Digest, among others. He is a member of the expert panel that sets the environmental Doomsday Clock; Onychophora curator in the Encyclopedia of Life; and team member of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
William Schaus was an American entomologist who became known for his major contribution to the knowledge and description of new species of the Neotropical Lepidoptera.
Carl W. Rettenmeyer was an American biologist who specialised in army ants. He was born in Meriden, Connecticut, and later attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He first became interested in army ants when he visited Panama as an undergraduate and then returned there as a postgraduate. Although he studied many aspects of army ant biology, he particularly focused on the animals associated with the ants and especially mites which live on the ants. He was well known for his photography of army ants, with his photographs appearing in over 100 publications, and he used his video footage to create two DVDs. He taught at the University of Kansas from 1960 until 1971 and then at the University of Connecticut until his retirement in 1996, after being diagnosed with Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. After his death in 2009, a set of papers on army ants were published in Insectes Sociaux in memory of his work.
Carla Maria Penz is a butterfly comparative morphologist and systematist, and the former Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Biodiversity at the University of New Orleans. Her research also focuses on natural history and behavior, mostly of neotropical butterflies. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of New Orleans, Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History (NY), Florida Museum of Natural History (FL), and The Milwaukee Public Museum (WI).
Singing caterpillars is a term coined by Philip James DeVries, referring to the fact that the larvae of ant-associated butterfly species of the families Riodinidae and Lycaenidae produce substrate borne sounds that attract ants. The study of these symbiotic associations was pioneered by Phil DeVries in Central America, and Naomi Pierce in Australia. Recently, Lucas Kaminski and collaborators are expanding the studies of riodinid-ant symbioses in Brazil.
Eurybia elvina, commonly known as the blind eurybia, is a Neotropical metalmark butterfly. Like many other riodinids, the caterpillars are myrmecophilous and have tentacle nectary organs that exude a fluid similar to that produced by the host plant Calathea ovandensis. This mutualistic relationship allows ants to harvest the exudate, and in return provide protection in the form of soil shelters for larvae. The larvae communicate with the ants by vibrations produced by the movement of its head. The species was described and given its binomial name by the German lepidopterist Hans Stichel in 1910.
Winifred Hallwachs is an American tropical ecologist who helped to establish and expand northwestern Costa Rica's Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). The work of Hallwachs and her husband Daniel Janzen at ACG is considered an exemplar of inclusive conservation.
Jose Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was initiated in 2001 by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, USA. It is named after José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist who worked on the flora of tropical South America. It is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a very significant contribution to advancing the field of tropical botany. Nominations for the award can be made by all in the Botany Department at the museum.
Paul Slud was an American ornithologist and tropical ecologist, known for his 1960 monograph The Birds of Finca "La Selva," Costa Rica and his 1964 book The Birds of Costa Rica: Distribution and Ecology.
Styx is a monotypic genus of butterflies in the metalmark family Riodinidae. It consists of one species, Styx infernalis, described by Otto Staudinger in 1875. It is endemic to Peru, where it inhabits tropical montane cloud forests between the elevations of 1000-1600 meters.