Philip James DeVries

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Philip J. DeVries
Phil DeVries
Phil DeVries
Fields Biologist
Institutions University of New Orleans
Notable awards MacArthur Fellowship (1988)
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship (1993)
Honorable mention, Rolex Awards for Enterprise (1993)
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1996)

Philip James DeVries PhD (born March 7, 1952) is a tropical biologist whose research focuses on insect ecology and evolution, especially butterflies. His best-known work includes symbioses between caterpillars, ants and plants, and community level biodiversity of rainforest butterflies.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early career

Phil DeVries was born in Detroit, Michigan, son of Henry William DeVries and Helen Mary DeVries (née Brnabic). His early interest in Biology was nourished by close contact with nature during his childhood in rural Michigan. As an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor DeVries was mentored in Botany by professor Warren H. Wagner Jr., known among colleagues as “Herb”. In 1975 DeVries received a Bachelor’s degree from the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, with emphasis in Botany. His early exposure to systematic botany continues to be useful in his career.

From 1975 to 1980, DeVries was a curator of Lepidoptera at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica as a Peace Corps volunteer where he built the country’s first major butterfly collection. DeVries traveled widely in Costa Rica collecting and making observations on butterflies. This eventually provided a large body of information that formed the basis for his two volumes entitled "The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History" (vol. 1 and 2). In Costa Rica he interacted with many field biologists, including, among others, Daniel Janzen, Stephen Hubbell, Gary Stiles, Luis Diego Gomez, Isidro A. Chacón, Gordon B. Small, Alwyn H. Gentry, Robin Foster, Lawrence E. Gilbert, Michael C. Singer, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Russel Lande.

DeVries attended the University of Texas at Austin from 1980 to 1987 where he earned a PhD in Zoology. His doctoral work focused on the widespread symbioses between butterfly caterpillars, ants and plants, which he popularized under the nickname “Singing caterpillars”. In 1982, DeVries received a fellowship from the Fulbright Program to visit The Natural History Museum in London (then British Museum of Natural History), where he spent a year preparing the first volume of his “The Butterflies of Costa Rica” book. There he collaborated with Richard I. Vane-Wright, Phillip R. Ackery, Bernard d’Abrera, Ian J. Kitching, Henry S. Barlow, and other curators and visitors deeply rooted in the history of butterfly biology, evolution and systematics.

In 1988 DeVries received a MacArthur Fellowship that allowed him to travel broadly in pursuit of tropical biology in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Argentina. Through the MacArthur Fellows Program he became close friends with the artists Lee Friedlander, Steve Lacy, John T. Scott, Brad Leithauser, and the historian Cornell Fleischer.

DeVries was a pre-doctoral (1985-1986) and post-doctoral fellow (1987-1988) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, UK (1990-1991), an associate of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University (1990-1992), and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow at Harvard University (1993-1994). He is a research associate of the American Museum of Natural History, Missouri Botanical Gardens, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Among other countries, DeVries has done field research in Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Bhutan, Australia, Borneo, Malaysia.

[edit] Recent time

DeVries was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon (1994-2000), where he developed trapping methods to accrue long-term data sets on tropical butterfly communities. Work with his colleague Russel Lande produced some of the first rigorous insights into the spatial and temporal dynamics of diverse rainforest insect communities. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Director of the Center for Biodiversity Studies and curator of Lepidoptera at the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin, and is presently a professor at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana. DeVries continues to study long-term butterfly community diversity, and speciation. His butterfly trapping methods are used widely in tropical diversity studies and conservation efforts. He also continues work on evolution of butterfly-ant symbioses.

[edit] Singing caterpillars

DeVries discovered the substrate-borne calls produced by caterpillars that form symbioses with ants in the butterfly families Riodinidae and Lycaenidae. In these symbioses, ants provide protection against arthropod predators in exchange for food secretions. DeVries demonstrated experimentally that the calls produced by singing caterpillars function to enhance caterpillar-ant symbioses in concert with caterpillar glands that produce food and chemical secretions. He also has shown that singing caterpillars occur widely throughout the world. His studies were the first to show that acoustical calls of one insect species can evolve to attract unrelated species in the context of symbiotic associations, fitting into a field of biological science termed Bioacoustics. Documentation and examination of interactions between organisms of different species integrate the fields of Natural History, Ecology and Evolution.

[edit] Natural History Films

For over 20 years DeVries has been involved with documentary natural history films as a writer, scientific advisor, and on-camera presenter for production companies that include National Geographic,Partridge Films, Oxford Scientific Films, Big Wave, Wildfilms, Grenada, and Green Umbrella Films. Fifteen of these documentaries have been televised globally by National Geographic Channel, BBC Television, and Scientific American Frontiers.

[edit] Photography

DeVries has worked as a natural history photographer, and his photographs have appeared in publications ranging from Ranger Rick and TV Guide to Nature,Science, and scholarly textbooks. Recently he has done street photography documenting societal effects after Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.

[edit] Selected Publications

  • DeVries, P.J. (1987) The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History. Volume I. Papilionidae, Pieridae and Nymphalidae. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 327 pp.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1997) The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History. Volume II. Riodinidae. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 288 pp.
  • Penz, C.M. & P.J. DeVries (2006) Systematic position of Apodemia paucipuncta (Riodinidae), and a critical evaluation of the nymphidiine transtilla. Zootaxa, 1190:1-50.
  • Molleman, F., A. Kop, P. Brakefield, P.J. DeVries & J.Z. Nas (2006) Vertical and temporal patterns of fruit-feeding butterflies in a tropical forest in Uganda. Biodiversity and Conservation, 15: 107-121.
  • Youngsteadt, E. & P.J. DeVries (2005) The effects of ants on the entomophagous butterfly caterpillar Feniseca tarquinius, and the role of chemical camouflage in the Feniseca-ant interaction. Chemical Ecology, 31: 2091-2109.
  • DeVries, P.J. (2002) Differential wing-toughness among palatable and unpalatable butterflies: direct evidence supports unpalatable theory. Biotropica, 34: 176-181.
  • Engen, S., R. Lande, T. Walla & P.J. DeVries (2002) Analyzing spatial structure of communities by the two-dimensional Poisson lognormal species abundance model. American Naturalist, 160: 60-73.
  • Penz, C.M. & P.J. DeVries (2002) Phylogenetic analysis of Morpho butterflies (Nymphalidae, Morphinae): implications for classification and natural history. American Museum Novitates, 3374: 1-33.
  • DeVries, P.J. & T.R. Walla (2001) Species diversity and community structure in neotropical fruit-feeding butterflies. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 74: 1-15.
  • DeVries, P.J., T.R. Walla & H. Greeney (1999) Species diversity in spatial and temporal dimensions of fruit-feeding butterflies in two Ecuadorian rainforests. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 68: 333-353.
  • DeVries, P.J., D. Murray & R. Lande (1997) Species diversity in vertical, horizontal, and temporal dimensions of fruit-feeding butterfly community in an Ecuadorian rainforest. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 62: 343-364.
  • DeVries, P.J. & G.O. Poinar (1997) Ancient butterfly-ant symbiosis: direct evidence from Dominican amber. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 264: 1137-1140.
  • DeVries, P.J., J.A. Thomas & R. Cocroft (1993) A comparison of acoustical signals between Maculinea butterfly caterpillars and their obligate host ant species. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 49: 229-238.
  • DeVries, P.J. & G.E. Martinez (1993) The morphology, natural history, and behavior of the early stages of Morpho cypris (Nymphalidae: Morphinae) – 140 years after formal recognition of the butterfly, Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 101: 515-530.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1992) Singing caterpillars, ants and symbiosis. Scientific American, 267: 76-82.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1991) The mutualism between Thisbe irenea and ants, and the role of ant ecology in the evolution of larval-ant associations. Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 43: 179-195.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1991) Call production by myrmecophilous riodinid and lycaenid butterfly caterpillars (Lepidoptera): morphological, acoustical, functional, and evolutionary patterns. American Museum Novitates, 3025: 1-23.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1990) Enhancement of symbioses between butterfly caterpillars and ants by vibrational communications. Science, 248: 1104-1106.
  • DeVries, P.J. & I. Baker (1989) Butterfly exploitation of a plant-ant mutualism: adding insult to herbivory. Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 97: 332-340.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1988) The larval ant-organs of Thisbe irenea (Riodinidae) and their effects upon attending ants. Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society, 94: 379-393.
  • DeVries, P.J. (1988) Stratification of fruit-feeding butterflies in a Costa Rican rainforest. Journal of the Research on the Lepidoptera, 26: 98-108.
  • DeVries, P.J., I. Kitching & R.I. Vane-Wright (1985) The systematic position of Antirrhea and Caerois, with comments on the higher classification of the Nymphalidae. Systematic Entomology, 10: 11-32.

[edit] References

  • C. Ballard (2006) The butterfly hunter: adventures of people who found their true calling way off the beaten path. Random House, 271 pp.

[edit] External Links

Persondata
NAME DeVries, Philip James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Phil DeVries
SHORT DESCRIPTION Biologist
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH