A motley crew

The immensity of the loss of an entire group of animals was abstract to me, until I took my first trip to Panama and saw a jungle stream teeming with so many types of frogs I had never seen before in my life; so the story begins with the trip to get there. Most of our research group met in February 2006 in the Atlanta airport to fly to Panama. This was an eclectic group of individuals who are science nerds (Ph.D.s), globe trotters, adventurers, and generally workaholics. Our common bond is a drive to understand the natural world. Everyone in the group has research experience in aquatic ecology around the world; studying streams is the thread that flows through all of our lives. Matt Whiles, Bob Hall, Alex Huryn and I were the lead researchers that traveled together on this trip.

Our connection in Atlanta was tight, and a bit of running was required to make it from the domestic terminal to the international departure gates. Bob Hall is the kind of person who is amusing to watch run for an airplane. Although I am told he is an excellent skier, he is tall, gangly and awkward looking when he runs, like a camel or a stork. He has the look and the accent of an Ivy League aristocratic intellectual. Bob looked a bit worse for the wear because he had recently returned from a research trip to streams in Venezuela and had not yet decompressed from that experience. He had a touch of the Chavez’s revenge as well.

Currently, Bob is an Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming. We have been friends since we met years ago in the North Carolina Adirondacks. We were attending a workshop to explore the use of stable chemical compounds to trace movement of elements (nitrogen) in streams. This new technique opened up an extremely productive area of research. We could use it to dissect out the basic processes that nourish all the plants and animals living in the streams. The method ultimately allowed comparison of streams from the tropics to the tundra, and resulted in a large project and ultimately a publication in the prestigious journal Science. Many investigators never are able to publish in this journal, as it is one of the top scientific outlets in the world and extremely competitive to get papers into.

It was our expertise in this tracer method that prompted Matt to involve us in the Panama project. In North Carolina, Bob and I hit it off immediately when we discovered our shared interest in home brewing. He had brought several small kegs of some of the best and more exotic beer I had ever tasted, a fact guaranteed to make me sit up, sip up, and take interest. Bob has since published some of the seminal papers on how animals and other organisms mediate movement of nitrogen through stream environments.

Alex Huryn was at the gate when I arrived. Alex is tall and slender, with a matching ambling bearing, thoughtful personality, and a preoccupied air. Many ecological researchers of my generation never left the 1970’s with regard to their hair, and between Alex’s brown hair over his collar and a substantial mustache, it was unlikely that he would be mistaken for a businessman outside of the silicon valley. He has studied stream invertebrates across North America, including the tundra of Alaska. Alex did stints in New Zealand and Maine, among other places, before he landed at the University of Alabama. Like so many ecologists with a pedigree from the University of Georgia (Matt and Bob included) he has a reputation for top level ecological research and partying hard, presumably to balance the tremendous intellectual and work load required to answer the questions that they doggedly pursue (or maybe that is just the excuse). They don’t call them the Georgia bulldogs for nothing.

I had seen Alex out-on-the-town at conferences. The last time I had seen him, he had crawled across a dance floor in New Orleans and bit me on the calf. The bulldog connotation again comes to mind. Before being bit on the calf, I had admired his research papers, but did not know him well. I was hoping he was easy to work with, but was not sure given our prior interaction.

Matt Whiles had a delayed flight from St. Louis and came to the gate at the last minute. He has been a close friend of mine since the 1990’s when we worked at Kansas State University together. Now he is a professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He is a very gregarious person; people are compelled to tell him their secrets for some reason, probably his friendly face. He has hair about the same as Alex, another child of the 70’s. Matt is gifted in the art of diplomacy and a perfect leader for a group such as ours with strong personalities and the professors’ common trait of always being certain of being right and ready to argue the point exhaustively.