Schweppe Lecture Series

Dr. Roy L. Caldwell
University of California at Berkeley

Thursday, April 13, 2006, 7:00 PM, Visitors Center Auditorium

"A Random Swim Through the Reefs of Indonesia"

No matter how much we plan, research directions often take strange twists and turns leading field biologists to places they never expected to work and meeting a cast of animals they never expected to study.  Forty years ago, a blizzard in Iowa caused Roy Caldwell to switch his research interests from insect ecology to the behavior of marine invertebrates.  Twenty years later while studying the behavior of mantis shrimp in Panama, an oil spill set in motion a chain of events that introduced him to the remarkable marine world of Indonesia.  In this talk Professor Caldwell will trace part of that journey describing some of the discoveries he and his students have made in the seas around the islands of Sulawesi and Komodo.  The audience will meet a new species of coelacanth, a rare and ancient fish previously known only from the western Indian Ocean.  He will discuss some of his work on octopuses including blue-ringed species whose bite can kill a person in minutes, octopus that walk on two legs, and species that may mimic sea snakes and flatfish.  He will explore the world of the mantis shrimp that, for its size, has one of the fastest and most powerful mechanical weapons in the animal kingdom.  A five inch mantis shrimp can crush a large snail or smash a glass aquarium.  These same animals have remarkably complex eyes used to detect hidden communicatory signals carried by ultraviolet, fluorescent and polarized light.  Finally, Professor Caldwell will discuss the loss of coral reefs due to blast and cyanide fishing and ways we can help damaged reefs recover.

Roy Caldwell is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.  He received his PhD from the University of Iowa in I969 studying insect migration, but while a graduate student, a summer at the Bermuda Biological Station convinced him that his real interests were in the behavior and ecology of tropical marine invertebrates, particularly stomatopod crustaceans and pygmy octopuses.  Accepting a position at Berkeley in 1970, he has taught courses in Animal Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Animal Diversity and the Biology of Tropical Islands.  His research has been conducted in tropical seas around the world including Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Enewetok, French Polynesia, Fiji, Hawaii, Panama and Florida.  He has mentored over 30 PhD students and has authored over 80 papers on the behavior and ecology of animals.  He and his students have been involved not only in research on mantis shrimp behavior, but have taken occasional diversions to study phenomena such as the recovery of coral reefs from the devastation of blast fishing, the impact of tropical oil spills, the behavior of blue-ringed octopus, bipedal locomotion in octopuses and the discovery of a new species of coelacanth in Indonesia.  An avid photographer, his work is frequently illustrated with images of the colorful animals with which he works.

The free lecture will be held at 7:00 p.m. in the Visitors Center of The University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, and the public is invited to attend. Dr. Caldwell's visit to the Marine Science Institute is part of the Laura Randall Schweppe Endowed Lecture Series in Marine Science.