Charles Michener 1918–2015

Authors: Michael D Breed

Publish Date: 2016/02/08

Volume: 47, Issue: 4, Pages: 491-494

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Abstract

Charles D Michener passed away in November 2015 Mich as he was known to his students friends and colleagues had a truly impressive career in evolutionary biology systematics and behavior Mich wrote a memoire 2007a in which he discusses both his personal and scientific history here I give my own perspective on the influence of his scientific thoughtMich’s professional career spanned ten decades He first published on bees when he was a high school student and his last paper was published just this year He became interested in bees as a child when he observed them visiting flowers that he was painting The bee systematists P H Timberlake and T D A Cockerell encouraged his passion for bees while he was still in high school and Mich spent a formative summer with Cockerell and his wife in Boulder CO where Cockerell was curator of entomology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History The generosity of the Cockerells in hosting a promising high school student helped to shape Mich’s own magnanimity as a mentorIn 1936 Mich moved from his childhood home in Pasadena to the University of California Berkeley where he made a quick passage through his undergraduate degree Still at Berkeley he then produced a doctoral dissertation on the systematics of bees that is recognized as a classic work The publication resulting from his dissertation Michener 1944 served as the basis for bee taxonomy until his own Bees of the World most recent version Michener 2007b supplanted it as the definitive work on bee systematics Mich guided numerous masters and doctoral students through genuslevel studies of bees as well as continuing his own deep line of thinking about bee evolution Of his work on bee systematics and evolution my favorite publication is his monograph on the biogeography of bees 1979 which is definitive—a gem of precision and a fount of informationMich enlisted in the army as an officer in its medical research corps during World War II While in Panama he worked out the life cycle of a chigger mite The army assignment took him to the tropics before it was common to work there and his Bees of Panama paved the way for understanding neotropical bees Michener 1954 His continued study of bees during his spare time while in the army illustrates a lifelong pattern of wise time management He never wasted an opportunityJobs in academia were scarce after the war and his first position at the American Museum of Natural History was as a curator and researcher of Lepidoptera This job caused him to detour his interests from bees to saturniid moths Michener 1949 But his clear preference was working with bees In 1948 he moved to a faculty position at the University of Kansas in Lawrence enabling his return to studies of bees this move was against the advice of Theodosius Dobzhansky who felt Mich could do better at a more wellknow university Mich came to love Lawrence and eastern Kansas but a scientist of his accomplishments could certainly have had opportunities to move to academic positions elsewhere had he wishedIn the course of his work on systematics he became fascinated by discoveries of social behavior in diverse and unexpected taxa within the bee phylogeny Guggenheim fellowships allowed him to travel to Africa and Australia to pursue work on allodapines He also spent time in Brazil working on halictid social behavior He coalesced his interest in bee behavior with his book Comparative Social Behavior of the Bees Michener 1974 This book was a masterpiece for a number of reasons including its comprehensiveness clarity of writing and depth of conceptual thought For many scholars of bees it was their first introduction to the rich palette of social behavior presented by bees other than honeybeesIt was also notable that Mich’s student Suzanne Batra first used the term eusocial in print and that Mich initiated what would become a decadeslong discussion of how to define eusociality Michener 1969 He recognized the importance of kin recognition in testing the principles proposed by W D Hamilton for the evolution of social behavior With Ed Barrows Mich introduced in the mid 1970s the first evidence of individual recognition in invertebrates and set the stage for what became an explosion of research into kin recognition Barrows et al 1975 Mich and David J C Fletcher edited a book on kin recognition that largely defined the field and shaped the questions and methods for decades of later researchers Fletcher and Michener 1987 I don’t think Mich ever viewed social behavior as the core of his scientific pursuits but he definitely believed that the richness of social behavior in bees added a valuable dimension to their studyMich thought deeply about the intellectual processes involved in the study of systematics He was interested in accurate useful species descriptions as well as how higher level taxonomic units could be used to inform analyses of evolutionary processes I credit him with the coinvention of numerical taxonomy with Robert Sokal Michener and Sokal 1957 but he was never an ardent pheneticist In a second paper Sokal and Michener 1958 developed UPGMA Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean which became the standard statistical technique for finding hierarchical clusters in numerical data A Web of Science search using UPGMA as the topic yields over 14000 papers most of which employ this approach in data analysis I believe that he was a coconspirator in Camin’s development of the Caminalcules an imaginary set of organisms used to test hypotheses about how systematic technique interacts with evolutionary hypothesis Sokal 1983 He was an early advocate of the use of cladistics in systematic analyses Ultimately he was a thoughtful and flexible systematist using tools such as numerical taxonomy and cladistics where appropriate but also relying on applying his immense knowledge of bees and his remarkable powers of integrative thinking to his work on bee classification

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