Follow the Breadcrumb Trail

Abstract

Porto Alegre was already a big city when I was born in 1961. Some time before my parents’ wedding, my grandmother Morena (née Adelina) had her house remodeled into an upstairs–downstairs duplex, and the upper floor was designed for the newlyweds. She also had the entire backyard paved with a mosaic of uneven pieces of tricolored ceramic tiles. According to my mother Isolde, grandma was tired of the “dirt” that was dragged into the house under everybody’s shoes. A few planters were left along the walls to house Sansevieria, Asparagus, and a Rhapis clump. Introduced European house sparrows roosted on a tall Dracaena that was fragrant at night when in bloom. Grandma also had a few large concrete planters cast to resemble tree trunks where Anthurium plants grew. From our house, the distant noise of a sawmill could be heard all day, and there was also the hustle and bustle of a Volkswagen car dealership located across the street. How could a biologist emerge from such an urban place?

Ó grande tempo

O que é meu está guardado

Não está grudado no céu


nem colado no futuro


Só sei que contigo está seguro

Excerpt from Grande tempo, by Fatima Guedes

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Porto Alegre was already a big city when I was born in 1961. Some time before my parents’ wedding, my grandmother Morena (née Adelina) had her house remodeled into an upstairs–downstairs duplex, and the upper floor was designed for the newlyweds. She also had the entire backyard paved with a mosaic of uneven pieces of tricolored ceramic tiles. According to my mother Isolde, grandma was tired of the “dirt” that was dragged into the house under everybody’s shoes. A few planters were left along the walls to house Sansevieria, Asparagus, and a Rhapis clump. Introduced European house sparrows roosted on a tall Dracaena that was fragrant at night when in bloom. Grandma also had a few large concrete planters cast to resemble tree trunks where Anthurium plants grew. From our house, the distant noise of a sawmill could be heard all day, and there was also the hustle and bustle of a Volkswagen car dealership located across the street. How could a biologist emerge from such an urban place ?

At the top of an annex at the back of the property was a large trellis-enclosed patio where my father Rubem grew orchids. He had more than 200 plants up there (easily), all well tended and pampered. One of my jobs was to collect and wash the aluminum caps that were on glass milk bottles, which I would smooth out into neat labels with my thumbnail. My father wrote on them with a dull-tipped pencil to make intaglios containing names and numbers, which he gently wrapped around a pseudobulb of each plant. Every winter the whole structure was covered with thick transparent plastic, so it was warm and humid inside when the sun was high. The orchidarium was a place of quiet solitude for my father and for me too. I remember being there until dusk one day, when lights came on in our kitchen and in those of other houses announcing dinner time. I was about 5 years old. With my hand on the green-painted metal rail, I slowly moved down the stairs smelling the air, hearing distant noises, noticing that Venus was starting to glisten in the sky. I was overtaken by a sentiment that is vivid to this day: the absolute happiness of a perfect life. Our family, our house, the plants, the fact that I could read, the subject matters I learned in school and understood, and a deep sense of gratitude for all the good things that had happened thus far. I felt fortunate and prepared—and I knew people who were not that way. At that moment I stepped out of my childhood universe to contemplate societal life and my incipient role in it.

Of course I was a regular kid and played like one, particularly because every weekend we visited my maternal grandmother Clara who had a fantastic yard where ornamental flowers and edible plants intermingled. There were fruit trees; a swing, a ditch filled with tadpoles; a soccer ball; and plenty of space for my siblings, our cousins, and myself to get dirty, sweaty, and tired (Fig. 3.1). We children were shown how to cut internodes of elephant grass to make straws to blow soap bubbles (a lesson in plant anatomy, in retrospect). Back in our orchid refuge, my father was experimenting with hybridization , and by 4th grade I was helping with that and waiting for pods to mature—which took an eternity but eventually yielded seeds that looked gorgeous under my father’s miniature microscope. Seed germination and plantule development were also too slow for a child’s energy level, so I kept busy with other things, such as growing mosquitoes from larvae to feed Drosera plants collected during summer vacations at the shore. As a back-to-school gift, my father bought me a copy of Mario Guimarães Ferri’s¹ Botânica, morfologia externa das plantas, and although the pages were filled with information too advanced for a 9-year-old, the comparative morphology illustrations were amazing, and I spent hours studying them. Using my book, I identified one of his plants, Platycerium alcicorne, to his great delight. Incidentally, that was one of the textbooks used in my first botany class at the university (and I still have it). My path had already been set, but it took me until 8th grade to approach my science teacher to say that I wanted to be a biologist and teach classes—like him. No, you should not aim to teach in a school, he said, research is what you want to do. As it turned out, I have done both.

Fig. 3.1

In the backyard of my grandmother Clara’s house, posing for a picture around my uncle’s Vespa motor scooter. From left to right: myself holding a plant, my brother Rubem “Mano” Penz, cousin Paulo Henrique Seth, and sister Cristina Penz. Photo by my uncle, João Batista “Tito” Freitas

Upon the start of my undergraduate program in biology in 1980, I naturally gravitated towards botany, while my friends joined the zoology crowd. The botany department was limping at the time: A highly esteemed systematics professor had taken health leave, a plant ecologist was in Germany for her PhD, and other professors seemed overworked. Serendipitously, as part of his genetics class, Aldo Araújo² took students to the field and showed us Müllerian mimics, Heliconius eggs on tendrils, lycaenids with false heads, silver markings on Agraulis vanillae, and other incredible natural history offerings. I was instantly hooked and started an internship in the natural history museum at my old high school in 1981. Thanks to the entomologist Jesuit Father Pio Buck S. J.³, Museu Anchieta housed the best butterfly collection in town. Aldo supervised my bachelor’s thesis on the genus Actinote (Fig. 3.2)—my own choice of research project prompted by finding a drawer of unidentified specimens (pure zoology, despite my association with the genetics department). This work was my initiation into systematics and comparative morphology. Jocélia Grazia⁴ (a Heteroptera systematist) verbally explained how to dissect male and female genitalia, and back at the museum, I put her words into practice. Through her guidance I became familiar with the work of Alexander Klots⁵, Karl Jordan⁶, Howard Hinton⁷, and other amazing entomologists of the past. At that time, to earn a bachelor’s degree in genetics, students were required to take eight courses in that area of concentration. In seven of those courses, I learned about, and read works by, the usual suspects Charles Darwin⁸, Henry Walter Bates⁹, Alfred Russell Wallace¹⁰, and also the more recent (but still classics) J. B. S. Haldane¹¹, Ronald Fisher¹², G. Ledyard Stebbins¹³, George G. Simpson¹⁴, Ernst Mayr¹⁵, and Verne Grant¹⁶. In other words, my peers and I were committed to studying hard and learned English simultaneously. That was also the time when I met Keith Brown¹⁷ (he came to visit my alma mater) and read papers by and corresponded with Woody Benson¹⁸, João Vaconcellos Neto¹⁹, Dick Vane-Wright²⁰ and Phil Ackery²¹, Olaf Mielke²² , and Mirna Casagrande²³ (all of whom I met years later). But an eighth genetics class needed to fulfill my degree requirements was not available, so I took Miriam Becker’s²⁴ Population Ecology instead, and she used Richard Southwood’s²⁵ Ecological Methods as the text. That course was a revelation to me and filled a big gap in my background. Although this is a good summary of my formative academic years, it is also significant to place them within a socioeconomic context. The military dictatorship was starting to weaken in Brazil , but there were still “rats” (government informers) among students at the university. Repression and censorship restrained Brazilian artists, especially poets and musicians, and many went into exile abroad. Several songs I heard in my youth, and memorized for life, are rich in obscure metaphors that disguised their real intent: to criticize the military government. The economy was fragile, inflation was a serious problem, and taxes on imported science books could be as high as 80 %—my gratitude goes to professors who shared important books with us students. Interlibrary loan services could be used to obtain research papers, but that was costly, and it took 2 weeks to 1 month for requests to be filled. In those days none of us would have made it through the undergraduate or graduate programs without the invaluable service of Xerox machines and their operators, not to mention numerous copyright infringements.

Fig. 3.2

Type specimen of Papilio pyrrha Fabricius, 1775 (Natural History Museum, London). Actinote is the first butterfly group I studied. The photograph of this historical, weathered specimen was kindly sent to me by Phil Ackery in 1982

Going to graduate school was a given for my closest peers and myself. This was a time in which personal decisions had professional consequences. I wanted to go to Universidade Estadual de Campinas and work with Keith Brown, but romance kept me in Southern Brazil. In 1985 I married my university boyfriend, Roberto Reis²⁶, a fish systematist. Aldo Araújo accepted me as a master’s student and suggested a research project on the inheritance pattern of two sex-limited mimetic color forms of Papilio hectorides (currently Heraclides). Real genetics! I did not waste time, read as much as I could, and wrote Sir Cyril Clarke²⁷ about the project, who promptly sent me an aerogram with good advice and a few hypotheses on the genetics of the hectorides color forms (for youngsters: here “promptly” refers to ca. 1 month between mailing a letter and receiving a response). After 2 years of juggling with diapausing and nondiapausing pupae that were reared side by side as larvae, hand-pairing adults, and doing my best to persuade females to lay eggs in captivity (which was rather tricky), a virus killed all my larvae in 1 week. That nearly got me out of graduate school altogether, and I felt despondent enough to question my career choice. It is odd to recount the big “die-out event” somewhat dispassionately here, given that it felt quite the opposite at the time. I knew the four local hectorides host plants from 2 years of field observations, and my fallback project therefore asked whether oviposition preference in the field matched larval development in the lab. It did not. That was the work I presented at the 1988 Simpósio Internacional de Ecologia Evolutiva de Herbívoros Tropicais organized by Thomas Lewinsohn²⁸ in Campinas, where I met Thomas, Larry Gilbert²⁹, Bob Marquis³⁰, Mark Scriber³¹, Lissy Coley³², Doug Futuyma³³, and many others. Larry was recruiting students and asked if I would be interested in doing a PhD in his lab. It was an exciting opportunity, so I applied for and was granted a graduate fellowship through a Brazilian funding agency (only four were given to zoology in the entire country, so my hard work paid off). I moved to Austin, Texas, in the August of 1989 with two suitcases of essentials, leaving everything else behind.

The first semester at the University of Texas (UT) was intense in all respects—classes, reading assignments, working on the manuscript from my M.S. research, hanging out with Mike Singer³⁴ and his lab members, and meeting so many people—it is hard to remember them all. I was not prepared for such a marathon, and considering my previous standards, I did poorly that semester. Dealing with all aspects of life in a foreign language took a lot of energy—I remember how hard it was to listen to the lecture and take notes at the same time. Speaking on the phone was surprisingly difficult (no body language to aid communication). Nonetheless, being surrounded by a fantastic group of people made a huge difference. Nancy Greig³⁵ was my first office mate and gave me a much-needed crash course of everyday words in English plus all sorts of other practical advice (e.g., go to the Goodwill thrift store to buy field clothes). Phil DeVries³⁶ and Peng Chai³⁷ were still at UT after finishing their PhD, and we became friends instantly due to shared scientific interests. During this time, I became involved with my lab mate Bob Srygley³⁸ who studied butterfly flight in collaboration with Peng. The Brazilians Evandro Oliveira³⁹ and Marcio Zikán Cardoso⁴⁰ joined the lab 1 year after I arrived, and Mirian Medina Hay-Roe⁴¹ later came from Peru. We were a truly cohesive group of people who encouraged one another, collaborated in projects, and made comments and suggestions on each other’s research manuscripts. Times were busy, the good kind of busy, and after my brain adjusted to a new language and faster pace, the graduate school experience became more pleasurable. For my PhD project, I decided to use comparative morphology to reconstruct a phylogeny of Neotropical Heliconiini . As a diagram that represents evolutionary history, a phylogeny provides the framework to ask biological questions about a particular group. For example, are the oldest heliconiine lineages associated with the oldest Passiflora host plant lineages? Phylogenies of butterflies and plants are required to answer questions such as this. Larry was a tad disappointed with my choice of data (morphology) because systematists were starting to use deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing for phylogenetic analyses, and he thought I should do the same. Although I learned the basics of DNA sequencing, I stayed with comparative morphology because handling and dissecting specimens is the type of work best suited for me—a visual person fascinated with anatomical complexity. When placed in an evolutionary context, the study of morphological diversification encapsulates Darwin’s concept of descent with modification—diversification in structure from ancestral to descendant life forms. This is what drove me to comparative morphology, and I will never cease to be fascinated by the sheer richness of structural and color diversity in butterflies (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3

Carla watching butterflies at the forest edge along the River Cristalino, MT Brazil (2009; Photo by Phil DeVries)

I went to Costa Rica for the first time in 1990 with Larry Gilbert’s field course. It was truly refreshing to walk around the forest without the fear of being mugged or hurt (my field site in Southern Brazil was not safe). I went to Panama and Ecuador multiple times during my graduate program, and I also did fieldwork near the Brazilian Amazonian state capitals of Manaus and Belém. The main point of my trip to Manaus was to find the larvae of Neruda aoede, but after extensive search their host plant, Dilkea, was nowhere to be seen. Aloísio, one of the seasoned field-workers from Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), heard that I was looking for such a plant and came to talk to me. He told me that he never found it at the site where we were, but he had tagged one Dilkea specimen in an inventory plot at the next bio station up the road. Aloísio gave me detailed directions to locate it: plot number, distance from the beginning of a particular transect, noting that the plant would be three paces from the transect edge—to the right. He apologized for not remembering the specimen number but assured me that the plant was tagged. Luckily, I was offered a car ride by an agronomist who listened to the whole conversation and happened to be going that way. He seemed enthused by the narrative and wanted to see this mysterious plant. When we got to the proper place, the plant was actually three paces to the left of the transect, and my guide for the day shook his head. I said, “No problem, we found the plant anyway, but it is too bad that there are no eggs or larvae on it.” That was not his point. He said, “Aloísio never ceases to amaze me. It has been 2 years since he has set foot in this place.” Life allowed me to meet many remarkable people in vastly different places….

In Panama, I was looking for heliconiine early stages for my PhD research, but also reared larvae of other groups on the side. That was the purpose of my trip to Ecuador too, and the mission was to find and rear two species: Podotricha telesiphe (at mid elevation) and Neruda aoede, which had eluded me in Manaus. In Baeza (1500 m), I found Podotricha eggs almost by accident because they are nearly identical in size and color to those of a common josiine moth that oviposits on the same Passiflora host. Podotricha eggs are striated though, and they look opaque when you flip the host plant leaf (the moth eggs are smooth and slightly shiny). It takes about 2 months for Podotricha to develop from egg to adult, so I practically became part of the family I stayed with in Baeza and was even dragged to mass every weekend by Doña Teresita, the owner of the hotel El Nogal de Jumandi. Instead of glass, the window of my hotel room was covered with plastic sheets that barely kept out the cold evening breeze, but the thick wool blankets were cozy and warm. Across the street from the hotel was Restaurante Gina, where I stopped for a cup of coffee and a Manicho cholocate bar with peanuts every day after fieldwork. People in Baeza were surprisingly familiar with transient researchers, especially botanists and butterfly biologists, and they showed me important landmarks (remnants of a stone-paved colonial times trail) and folk remedies (wax of a fulgorid nymph used to treat infected wounds). During the same trip, in my first walk through the lowland forest at Jatun Sacha Biological Station, I found a cluster of Neruda aoede eggs on a new shoot of Dilkea just a meter off the ground and right in the middle of a trail! As far as I know, Rev. Arthur Miles-Moss⁴² had been the only other person to rear that species some 80 years before. Although Podotricha telesiphe and Neruda aoede are the two most remarkable caterpillars I have reared, every single species has been a gift. I could write pages and more pages about what happened during my 3 months of fieldwork in Ecuador in 1992, but these two short accounts provide a good depiction of how things went.

I had the opportunity to live in England for 1 year in 1993. During that time, I spent 1 day per month at the British Museum of Natural History and will never forget that Phil Ackery always came to chat at about midmorning, two cups of coffee in hand. It was a privilege to get to know Phil, learn from him, and to examine specimens collected by Bates and other heroes of mine. I also met Dick Vane-Wright, Miriam Rothschild⁴³ (Phil introduced us!), Bernard d’Abrera⁴⁴, Jim Mallet⁴⁵ and Sandy Knapp⁴⁶ plus their children, and reconnected with George Beccaloni⁴⁷ (who I had met at Jatun Sacha the previous year). Comparative morphology , phylogenetic systematics, butterfly behavior, evolution, and general biology were definitely at the very center of my life, and that was also the case for most of my friends and new acquaintances. The year in England was truly productive and opened new horizons for me, but it went by fast. It was time to return to my home base in Texas to finish my PhD project.

Not butterflies but a long-standing friendship brought Phil DeVries and me together, and we were married in 1997. In my opinion, however, there is no relationship more complete than that between two people who share intellectual passions. Indeed, individually and as a couple we have been criticized by family and friends for “doing nothing but work” (which is not exactly true). We both recognize that there is no line between our personal lives and our research, and Phil has been my greatest supporter, critic, and idea partner—with an occasional hint of aggravation to keep things interesting. It was during our partnership that my research approach matured and became more integrative.

When in Phil’s lab at the University of Oregon, I started to work on the main manuscript from my PhD dissertation—the phylogeny of Heliconiini . When the study was finally published in 1999, I was excited to send out reprints to potentially interested colleagues. The list of recipients included Lt. Col. John Eliot⁴⁸, who replied with compliments, comments, and quite a few questions. We began what would become a regular correspondence, and John asked me to explain the basic principles of cladistic analyses, which I did. He replied with insightful remarks such as “not all structures have the same importance” and, of course, more questions. We continued to exchange letters even after Phil and I moved to Wisconsin to work at the Milwaukee Public Museum. At some point, I was late replying to one of John’s letters due to a ridiculous amount of time devoted to a grant proposal. He sent me an aerogram explaining his urgency—he was dying of cancer. Needless to say, I wrote immediately with an apology, the answers, and sincere sorrow for what was inevitably happening to him. John responded that he was at peace with the circumstances (in fact he addressed me with comforting words). He thanked me for the information, which was needed for his final revision of Corbet and Pendlebury’s The Butterflies of the Malay Peninsula. That was my last exchange with Lt. Col. John Eliot—a true gentleman—whom I never met in person, but felt in spirit.

In 2002 my first research project on Morpho butterflies was published, the largest and most celebrated butterflies I had ever studied. Exploring closely related groups seemed a natural course of action, and I started to look into brassolines and amathusiines, making good use of museum collections . This is the perfect place in my narrative to acknowledge field biologists for their efforts collecting specimens and museums for safekeeping and making them available to the research community. Without collections I could not do the work I do and definitely would not have become the person I am.

Phil and I moved to Louisiana to join the faculty at the University of New Orleans in 2004 (1 year before the infamous hurricane Katrina), where I continue to expand the research projects started long before. I gave a seminar about my work in Copenhagen early in 2005, when I had the honor to meet Niels Kristensen⁴⁹, his former PhD student Thomas Simonsen⁵⁰, and several other researchers. Timidly, I showed Niels a series of riodinid male genitalia drawings demonstrating that homologous anatomical parts had become fused in different ways along the diversification of the group. He smiled at the illustrations in genuine interest saying that the repeated evolution of such patterns within Lepidoptera never ceased to amaze him. Niels’ words made my heart sing, given that they came from one of the most knowledgeable researchers in the field who has directly or indirectly touched the lives of all contemporary comparative morphologists working with Lepidoptera . It is always a pleasure to receive and read his publications, many of which are much broader in scope than what most researchers could ever hope to accomplish, myself included. For practical reasons, my work has become more focused, and during the past 15 years, Neotropical brassoline butterflies have been extremely generous to me. I have studied their morphology, phylogeny, and wing color variation at the tribal and generic levels. Diversification of projects is usually correlated with collaborative work with colleagues (old and new), and Phil and I have joined forces with good friends such as George Austin⁵¹, Niklas Wahlberg⁵², Russ Lande⁵³, and André V. L. Freitas⁵⁴. After all, collaborative research allows each collaborator to do what we do best. Thank you George for being passionately obsessed with butterflies and sharing information and specimens; Niklas, for choosing DNA sequence as your preferred data source; Russ, for knowing a lot about numbers and just enough about butterfly biology; and André, for being a strong supporter of butterfly research in Brazil .

What about here and now? I feel my main research field for so many years, phylogenetic systematics, may not be enough to drive me forward. My career path seems to be doing a full circle back to natural history , which provided the original impetus to study butterflies. I will forever be in awe of their immense morphological and evolutionary diversification—a surprise in every dissection, every field observation, and every group. Butterflies are magnificent living sculptures that allow me to do creative work. They make me think and keep me awake at night (in a good way). Professional commitments and distance to Neotropical forests are making it difficult for me to spend extended periods of time in the field, and as a result I have become even more aware of the importance of making rigorous and reliable field observations. Natural history observations provide the spark for everything else we seek to learn through either classical or advanced technological means. No matter how small, each of our (collective) butterfly studies brings us closer to the natural world—and that is the reason why I became a biologist. Academia has changed tremendously since many of us started our careers, and natural history museums seem to be at risk of extinction. So, I do think about the day when I may not be able to perform my work in a way that meets my own standards and satisfaction. That will not be tragic, but merely the conclusion of a fantastic journey that can be retraced by following the breadcrumb trail of my publications. My work is my history and my legacy.