ESA Historical Records Committee Newsletter October 2019

No. 19 October 2019 Karen Warkentin delivered a thought‐provoking plenary address at the opening of the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Louisville last August. She is an integrative and comparative biologist who is interested in phenotypic plasticity, development, and behavior, but she also integrates perspectives from gender and sexuality studies with biology. Since 2011, half of her teaching at Boston University has been in women, gender, and sexuality studies, in collaboration with humanists and social scientists. As she explained, she brings biological knowledge about diversity and plasticity into conversation with other fields, and brings gender and sexuality studies back to biologists. Her plenary lecture, entitled “All the Variations Matter: Bridging Disciplines and Communities to Study Diversity in Life History and Sexual Behavior,” segued from a discussion about how frog embryos perceive vibrational cues to make life and death decisions, to the importance of encouraging diversity within science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) fields. Here, we present a few highlights from her talk. Warkentin explained through her own research, and the research of her graduate students and collaborators, why diversity is important for creative science. Her talk was a reminder of the conservative nature of much of science, a conservatism illustrated by the way certain kinds of questions remain unasked, and certain topics of research remain unexplored, for long periods of time. This conservatism fosters skeptical reactions to new ideas, and quick dismissal of claims that appear to be impossible or without significance. Diversity within the community of scientists, she argued, was one way to break through this conservatism, for diverse people bring new perspectives to science and their perspectives can lead to new questions and new knowledge. In her work, observations that opened up new questions leading to foundational discoveries began with close attention to the diversity and plasticity of behavior within the animal world. She discovered things that others had dismissed as impossible. Warkentin works mainly on frog eggs and is known for her discovery of predator‐induced hatching, as well as integrative work on how frog embryos respond to environmental cues when hatching. Her research trajectory was shaped by many experiences. As a child in Kenya, she learned to love the tropics, but frogs were not yet in the picture. Later, as an undergraduate in Canada, she experienced an epiphany after hearing a lecture about