Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 23, 2005|Volume 34, Number 4

Naomi E. Pierce

Expert on butterfly and ant interactions
to visit as Tetelman Fellow

Naomi E. Pierce, the Hessel Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, will visit the campus as the Tetelman Fellow for the fall semester.

Pierce will be the featured speaker at three campus events, all of which are open to the public. She will give the Tetelman Lecture on "Ant-Loving, Meat-Eating, Cradle-Robbing Caterpillars: The Evolution of Blue Butterflies" at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 28, in Davies Auditorium, Becton Engineering Center, 15 Prospect St. On Thursday, Sept. 29, at 4 p.m., she will be the guest at a Jonathan Edwards College master's tea and will speak on "Butterflies in the Art and Science of Vladimir Nabokov" in the master's house, 70 High St. Both the Tetelman Lecture and the master's tea are free. Pierce will give a seminar, jointly sponsored by Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Peabody Museum of Natural History, on Friday, Sept. 30, at 2 p.m., on the "Evolution and Speciation of Lycaenid Butterflies" in the auditorium of the Peabody Museum, 170 Whitney Ave. The seminar is free with museum admission.

A Yale College graduate, Pierce is an expert on the ecology and evolution of species interactions. She studies relationships between ants and caterpillars of a large group of butterflies, the blues, coppers and hairstreaks. These relationships range from exquisitely refined symbiosis -- ant farmers that defend their caterpillar cows in exchange for a protein-rich "milk" -- to pure exploitation -- caterpillars that chemically fool ants into admitting them into the ant nest where the caterpillars feast on the ant juveniles. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her research.

The Tetelman Fellowship was endowed in 1979 by Damon Wells '58 in memory of his friend, Alan S. Tetelman '58, '61 Ph.D., who died in an air crash over San Diego Airport in 1978.

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