 | Charles L. Remington |
Was known for his passion for butterflies and moths
Charles Lee Remington, emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, field naturalist and museum curator, died on May 31 at age 85 in Hamden, Connecticut.
The Yale scientist was known for his eclectic research interests, his facility for integrating comparative information about animals and plants from far-flung sources, and his zeal for mentoring young scientists and introducing children to the world of insects.
Born to Pardon Sheldon and Maud Remington in Reedville, Virginia, on Jan. 19, 1922, Remington became interested in the natural world as a child in St. Louis, Missouri. He carried this passion into undergraduate studies at Principia College, where he received a B.S. in 1943. During his military service in World War II, he served as a medical entomologist, traveling throughout the Pacific, researching and combating afflictions as diverse as insect-borne epidemics and the giant centipede bites inflicted on servicemen in the Philippines.
Remington received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1948, where he worked on the systematics of Thysanura and other primitive arthropods with the noted entomologist Frank Carpenter. His lifelong love, however was butterflies and moths, the order lepidoptera. At Harvard he became friends with the author Vladimir Nabokov, who was curating lepidoptera at the university museum. Also while in Boston, Remington and Harry Clench, another close associate, founded The Lepidopterists' Society in 1947, with support from his wife and longtime scientific collaborator Jeanne Remington. Remington held many positions in the society, including president and editor of its scientific journal.
In 1948, Remington joined the Department of Zoology at Yale. During the next 44 years, he held appointments in the Department of Biology, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and the Institute for Social & Policy Studies. In 1958-1959 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Oxford University, where he worked with the geneticist E.B. Ford and others.
Remington taught a variety of courses on ecology, evolution, entomology, bioethics, endangered species and the biodiversity crisis, including his hallmark "The Biology of Terrestrial Arthropods." He mentored several generations of scientists, advising more than 80 doctoral candidates and 60 undergraduate honors theses.
"His flair was a willingness and ability to use his encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world to counsel students with interests as disparate as butterfly genetics, goat behavior, cave ecology, legal solutions to environmental issues, plant pollination, insect vision, and the locomotor physiology of monkeys," says Lawrence F. Gall of the Peabody Museum.
Remington became intrigued by island biology while serving in the military in the Pacific, and over time visited more than 75 islands, especially Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California. During summers from the 1950s through the 1980s, he also took his research, students and family to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, at the site of the former mining boomtown in Gothic, Colorado, to investigate the biology of high-altitude ecosystems.
Mountaintops at high altitudes often function as island analogues, with populations of plants and animals over time being either isolated from or in contact with one another as a result of climatic and related shifts. Remington amassed an array of field observations from North America and elsewhere and in 1968 integrated these experiences in a paper titled "Suture zones of hybrid interaction between recently joined biotas." The paper's themes have since become absorbed into the conceptual framework of modern evolutionary biology.
Remington was also widely known for his popularization of magicicada, the periodical cicadas whose populations in North America produce flying adults by the billions for a few days in early summer once every 17 years. He established a Cicada Preserve to protect one of the largest remaining colonies in southern Connecticut.
During his tenure at Yale, Remington also served as curator of the Entomology Division at the Peabody Museum. There, he assembled a world-class insect collection numbering more than one million specimens.
In addition to The Lepidopterists' Society, Remington helped found the Connecticut Entomological Society and the Xerces Society, and was a member and officer in a variety of other scientific organizations. He also helped found Zero Population Growth. In 1970, with former Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and others, he convened the Convention on Optimal Population and Environment conference in Chicago, which inspired many subsequent environmental and population conferences. Remington was a founding member of the Unitarian Society of New Haven.
He is survived by his wife, Ellen Mahoney of Hamden; his former wife, Jeanne Remington of Boulder, Colorado; his three children, Janna Remington of Boulder, Colorado, Eric Remington of Saratoga, California, and Sheldon Remington of Hilo, Hawaii; and three grandchildren, Luke Remington Klingsmith, Ejyo Remington and Jeffrey Remington.
A commemorative symposium in Remington's honor will take place on Saturday, June 30, at the Unitarian Society, 700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden.
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