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Dr. Roy Caldwell BA, Psychology and Zoology, University of Iowa, 1965 Ph.D, Zoology, University of Iowa, 1969 Growing up on a farm in Iowa, I didn’t see an ocean until I was 20. My first experience with the sea was on the coast of Maine. One foot tentatively dipped into the surf quickly convinced me that it was far too cold for any sane person to want to swim in it. I returned to Iowa to study crayfish learning and eventually to begin the research for my Ph.D dissertation on the migration of milkweed bugs. However, three years later I had the opportunity to spend the summer at the Bermuda Biological Station working with my major professor on communication in mantis shrimp, an obscure, mostly tropical group of predatory marine crustaceans. There I discovered that the ocean could be warm and that it contained some fascinating animals - including a shark that bit my fin on my very first dive using SCUBA. I spent a second summer in Bermuda completing that research, but then resigned myself to finishing my dissertation searching for milkweed bugs in the roadside ditches of Iowa. After receiving my Ph.D in 1969, I accepted a postdoctoral position in England looking at the hormonal control of insect dispersal and fully expected to spend my academic career landlocked - working with insects. However, fate often twists our intentions in totally unexpected directions. In 1970, Berkeley advertized a position for an assistant professor with research interests in the area of marine invertebrate behavior. There weren’t many jobs in insect behavior being advertized that year, so I decided to apply knowing that my two summers watching mantis shrimp probably didn’t qualify me for the position. To my surprise, I was invited for an interview. My job seminar certainly would have convinced anyone that I knew little about marine invertebrates, but I was asked to give another seminar on my insect work, and on that basis, was offered the job. Arriving in Berkeley the following fall, I felt that I should probably concentrate my research in the area that I was hired. The only marine organisms I knew anything about were mantis shrimp, but there were no stomatopods off the northern California coast (which is too cold for them and me). I started making trips to Baja and Hawaii where I collected stomatopods and brought them back to Berkeley for laboratory study. Eventually, my work took me to Enewetok, Australia and Thailand where I was able to observe dozens of different species of mantis shrimp. From examining such diversity, I was able to begin to draw insights into the biology of this group, the most important of which was that their evolution was intimately connected to the development of a pair of powerful raptorial appendages used for prey capture and processing and as potentially lethal offensive weapons. I’m often struck by how our curiosity about one organism can take us on what seems like a random walk through nature. While I have spent most of my academic life studying the behavior of mantis shrimp, that pursuit has lead to a diversity of shifts in focus and side excursions that could not have been predicted. A mistake in conducting an experiment to determine the influence of size on how well an animal can defend a cavity caused me to match two animals that had fought one another the previous day. The animal that had lost immediately fled without so much as a skirmish. I spent the next four years investigating individual recognition in mantis shrimp and found that they are one of the only invertebrates that can remember an opponent for weeks. Studying the population biology of stomatopods on a reef flat in Panama lead to an eight year study following the impact of a major oil spill that occurred on our study site. That in turn lead to studies by my students and I using stomatopods to monitor the effects of pollution and fishing practices on reefs in Indonesia. Most recently, those monitoring studies have resulted in the discovery of a previously unknown population of coelacanths in northern Sulawesi. Because octopus compete with stomatopods for cavities in coral rubble, I now find myself studying the behavior of various pygmy octopuses including the deadly blue-rings. A chance meeting in Trieste with Tom Cronin at the first and only all stomatopod meeting fueled my interest in stomatopod vision and puts me this summer on my second Aquarius mission. It has been a long and convoluted journey from seeing my first stomatopod in Ferry Reach in Bermuda to participating in an Aquarius mission. It is the adventure of discovery and the excitement of not knowing what waits under the next rock that has made it so much fun. |
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