Roy L. Caldwell
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3140
4roy@socrates.berkeley.edu

BA, Psychology and Zoology, University of Iowa, 1965 PhD, Zoology, University of Iowa, 1969

Like many of the marine biologists I know, and most of those on this Aquarius mission, I grew up far from the sea. I was raised on a farm in Iowa and didn't see an ocean until I was 20. My first marine experience 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 PhD 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 PhD 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 advertised a position for an assistant professor with research interests in marine invertebrate behavior. I applied knowing that my two summers watching mantis shrimp probably didn't qualify me for the position. To my surprise, I was offered the job. Arriving in Berkeley the following fall, I felt that I should probably concentrate my research in the area for which 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 Curacao, Enewetok, Australia and Thailand where I was able to observe dozens of different species of mantis shrimp. From examining such diversity, I began to draw insights into their evolution which was intimately connected to the development of a pair of powerful raptorial appendages used for prey capture and processing and also 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. Because octopus competes 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 with Dr. Tom Cronin in Trieste at the first and only all stomatopod meeting fueled my interest in stomatopod vision and lead to a decade long collaboration. It was that research that spawned our first Aquarius mission in 1995 and which now puts me this summer on my third Aquarius mission.

It has been a long and convoluted journey from seeing my first stomatopod in Ferry Reach in Bermuda to participating in Aquarius missions. 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.