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My Idyllic Academic Career © Eric R. Pianka I have been
exceedingly fortunate throughout my entire academic career. Beginning in
Minnesota at Carleton College, a small liberal arts school, where I majored in
biology, I went on to graduate school at the University of Washington Seattle
where I earned my Ph. D. in 1965. Funded by an NIH predoctoral, I studied
species diversity of flatland desert lizards of North America at series of ten
study sites. Several were in the cold deserts of the Great Basin in Idaho and
Nevada. A few others were in the Mojave desert in
California and Nevada, and several others in the Sonoran desert in California
and Arizona. Later I extended these studies to include two more study sites in
Sonora, Northern Mexico. A 3-year NIH
postdoctoral fellowship in 1965 to 1968 allowed me to study with Robert H.
MacArthur at Princeton, where I prepared an NSF proposal to extend my studies
to the Australian deserts. With my ex-wife Helen, we spent 16 months doing
fieldwork down under, mostly in the Great Victoria desert
of Western Australia, where we found the most diverse lizard assemblages known
(55 species occur in sympatry at my most diverse study area). We also
discovered half a dozen as yet undescribed new lizard species (two of which are
named after each of us). A. R. Main and G. M. Storr were my Australian mentors,
both providing invaluable advice and support. In April 1968, I returned to
Princeton with a collection of some 3,000 Australian desert lizards (now
deposited in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History). I arrived at the
University of Texas in August 1968 and since then I have taught ecology to
about six thousand undergraduates and literally hundreds of graduate students
over the past half century. I have supervised 21 graduate students, half of
whom hold tenured professorships at major universities. I grew weary of
apologizing for the inadequacies of available textbooks, and so in 1974, I
published my own textbook ÒEvolutionary EcologyÓ,
which became a ÒCitation Classic"
that has persisted through 40+ years.
This book went through six editions (three publishers) and has been translated into Greek,
Japanese, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Recently I published it as an eBook in a 7th
edition (Read on line). Using this textbook, I developed my own
signature course ÒEvolutionary EcologyÓ, which I taught for many years until
2013, when my TA was taken away at the last moment because Òonly 40 studentsÓ
were registered for my class. Until that semester, I had always been given a
competent TA and my class was well received as judged by course evaluations
from students. That was the last time I taught ÒEvolutionary EcologyÓ, since
then I have been teaching a large freshman level class for non-majors ÒEcology,
Evolution, and SocietyÓ. I feel this is an opportunity and an obligation to
educate people who will learn little biology in their lives with the goal of
making them into better informed citizens of this, our one and only spaceship,
planet Earth. In 1986, I was
extremely fortunate to be awarded the Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professorship
in Zoology for life. Funds from this endowment have kept my research program
alive for three decades when few other sources of support were available. I have given hundreds of invited lectures at most of the world's major academic institutions. I gave the plenary lecture on the state of the art of community ecology at the First World Congress of Herpetology in Canterbury in 1989, and, at the 18th International Congress of Zoology in Athens in 2000, I presented the opening address entitled " A General Review of Trends in Zoology during the 20th Century." With Ray Huey and Tom Schoener, I co-edited a symposium volume in 1983 entitled "Lizard Ecology: Studies of a Model Organism" (Harvard University Press). In 1986, I published a synthesis of my life's research, an important book entitled "Ecology and Natural History of Desert Lizards. Analyses of the Ecological Niche and Community Structure." (Princeton University Press). I was a Guggenheim
Fellow in 1978-1979 and a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar during 1990-1991
(both these were spent doing fieldwork in Australia). In 1990, I submitted my
collected papers to the University of Western Australia for which I was awarded
the Doctor of Science degree. In 1994, Laurie Vitt and I co-edited another
symposium volume on "Lizard Ecology: Historical and Experimental
Perspectives" (Princeton University Press). Also, in 1994, I published an
autobiographical account of my adventures in Australia "The Lizard Man Speaks" (University of Texas Press). In 2003, with coauthor Laurie Vitt, the most important book ever written about lizards "Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity" was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley. This book on lizards won the Best Non-Fiction Book Award at the Oklahoma Center for the Book in 2004 and the Grand Prizeat the Ninth Annual UT Coop Robert W. Hamilton Book Awards. With the late Dennis
R. King, I coedited the ultimate reference volume on monitor lizards "Varanoid Lizards of the World," a collection of essays by over 30
international experts published in 2004 by Indiana University Press (peruse selected pages). I was chosen as the
Herpetologists League's "Distinguished Herpetologist" in 2004. In the
same year, at the joint Ichthyologist/Herpetologist's annual meeting in Norman,
Oklahoma, I was honored in a session organized by Gad Perry and Laurie Vitt
entitled "Ecology and Evolution of Reptiles: A Tribute to
Eric Pianka." Many
of my students and colleagues gave papers at this session. At the same meeting,
the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists passed "Resolution of Piankafication" which was published in their journal
Copeia 2004: 989-990. In 2006, The Texas
Academy of Science named me "Distinguished Scientist." I received a standing ovation for my
acceptance speech on the Vanishing Book of Life on Earth, which was unfortunately misinterpreted by an intelligent design advocate in the audience (to read about this
vilification, slander, and resulting controversy, click here). With my graduate
student Stephen Goodyear, we spent September-December of 2008 continuing field work at two study sites in the Great Victoria Desert
of Western Australia. People were surprised to find an old ecologist avidly
pursuing field work at age 70. We participated in
making a wildlife documentary video on monitor lizards, "(Lizard Kings," which premiered nationally in the USA
on PBS NOVA on the 20th of October 2009. Another version of this video, which
showcased some of my research, also premiered down under on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation ABC on 18 July 2010. It received several awards for
best wildlife documentary. I became a Fellow of
Ecological Society of America in 2013. I was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2014. In 2015, I gave the Keynote address at the
Interdisciplinary World Conference on Monitor Lizards at Phranakhon Rajabhat
University in Bangkok, where I won the Auffenberg Medal At 77, I am too old to
take on new graduate students because it is tantamount to adopting an adult for
many years – since I can no longer guarantee such a 4-5 year commitment
required to finish graduate school, I declared an end to all that with my 21st
grad student. Instead, I now sponsor Brazilian academics, both postdocs and
grad students, which requires only one semester to a year. Because I no longer
have graduate students or grants, my teaching load has been increased, a not so
subtle form of age discrimination. During the last few
years I have published several important papers, including: Pianka, E. R. and S.
E. Goodyear. 2012. Lizard responses to wildfire in arid interior Australia:
Long-term experimental data and commonalities with other studies. Austral
Ecology 37: 1-11. Download pdf Pianka,
E. R. 2012. Can humans
share spaceship earth? (ÒPoint of ViewÓ) Amphibian and
Reptile Conservation 6(1): 1-24(e49). Download pdf Bšhm,
M. et al. with 217 coauthors (one of whom is Eric R. Pianka). 2013. The conservation status of the worldÕs
reptiles. Biological Conservation 157: 372-385. Download pdf Pianka,
E. R. 2014. Rarity in Australian Desert Lizards. Austral Ecology 39:
214-224. Download pdf Mesquita, D. O.,
Colli, G. R., Costa, G. C., Costa, T. B., Shepard, D. B., Vitt, L. J. and
Pianka, E. R. 2015. Life history data of lizards of the
world. Ecology 96: 594. Download pdf Winemiller,
K. O., D. Fitzgerald, L. Bower, and E. R. Pianka. 2015. Functional traits, convergent evolution,
and periodic tables of niches. Ecology Letters 18(8):
737–751. Download pdf Mesquita, D. O., R. G.
Faria, G. R. Colli, L. J. Vitt, and E. R. Pianka. 2016. Lizard life-history
strategies. Austral Ecology 41: 1-5. Download pdf
Mesquita, D. O., G. C. Costa, R. Colli, T. B. Costa, D. B. Shepard, L. J. Vitt, and E. R. Pianka.
2016. Life history patterns of lizards of the world. The American Naturalist 187: 689-705.
Download pdf
Pianka,
E. R. 2016. Challenges facing today's lizard ecologists. Journal of Herpetology 50, in press. Eric Pianka can be reached at eric.pianka@heaven/hell.com Return to Pianka lab page |
