George A. Bartholomew (June 1, 1919-October 2, 2006)
Professor Emeritus, Department of Biology, UCLA
In Memoriam
On October 2, 2006, George A. Bartholomew, distinguished emeritus professor in UCLA's Department
of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, passed away at age 87 of complications from cancer. Known as
"Bart" to his students, colleagues, and friends, Bartholomew was an outstanding scientist of
international renown, was a distinguished mentor of graduate students, and played important roles
in shaping the history of his department and of the life sciences at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. at
Harvard in 1947 and joined the UCLA faculty shortly thereafter, devoting his entire academic
career of more than four decades to UCLA until his retirement in 1989.
Bart was born June 1, 1919, in Independence, Missouri. His father, George A. Bartholomew, was a commercial artist and his mother, Esther Carstensen Bartholomew, worked first as a sales person and later as a children's wear buyer for the Joseph Magnin Department stores in the San Francisco area. Bart earned his Bachelor's and Masters of Arts degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940 and 1941 and married Elizabeth (Betty) Burnham in 1942. As with many in his generation, his academic career was interrupted by World War II when he served as a physicist in the U.S. Naval Bureau of Ordnance.
Bart was a highly creative and productive researcher. With Per Scholander and Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, he was one of the founders of the modern fields of comparative animal physiological ecology and behavioral physiology. His research career extended over 63 years and led to the publication of over 150 research papers. W.R. Dawson, his first doctoral student, gives a detailed description and analysis of his research output in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 45, pp 219-230 (2005). Bart had a broad, synthetic view of the functional adaptations of organisms to their natural environments, bringing together the fields of physiology, behavior, and ecology, and did important work on plants in addition to his many studies of animals. He was a strong advocate of studying organisms in the field as well as in the controlled conditions of the laboratory and was flexible in his research methods, bringing new technologies to field investigations. He was a pioneer in the study of desert organisms and extended his comparative approach to organisms in both Australia and South Africa. His last published words in 2005 concern his personal philosophy and approach to research and may be found in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 45, pages 330-332.
The stature of Bart's contributions to science was recognized by his elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1981 and the National Academy of Science in 1985. He received many other honors, including the first Grinnell Medal awarded by the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley in 1983 and an honorary D.Sc. by the University of Chicago in 1987. He served as President of the American Society of Zoologists - now the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) - in 1980, and he personally considered his most satisfying honor to be the establishment within SICB of the George A. Bartholomew Award in 1992. That award is given annually to a "Distinguished young investigator in comparative physiology, comparative biochemistry, or related fields of functional biology."
Bart was a distinguished teacher at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, but especially of graduate students, and he was presented with a UCLA campus Distinguished Teaching Award in 1966 in recognition of his mentoring of graduate students. His reputation as a mentor has become near legendary: a high proportion of his 42 doctoral students and 14 postdoctoral scholars have gone on to become significant figures in their own fields of study. His academic genealogy is described by A.F. Bennett and C. Lowe in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, Volume 45, pages 231-233 (2005) and is given in detail on a website: http://bartgen.bio.uci.edu/tree. Through the Department of Ecology and Evolution's Bartholomew Research Fellowship Awards, established by Bart and Betty after his retirement and significantly augmented by Bart and Ruth before their deaths, he continues to support graduate students working in areas related to his broad interests.
Beyond the classroom, Bart worked extensively for many years with the eminent photographer Robert Dickson of UCLA's University Extension to develop a series of 30 teaching documentary films that are still widely used. With colleagues Malcolm Gordon, Fred White, Alan Grinnell, and C. Barker Jorgensen he was a major contributor to a textbook of comparative ecological physiology that had four editions between 1968 and 1982 and that was both widely adopted internationally and influential in the development of its field. He also co-authored an introductory zoology textbook.
Bart was one of the most influential figures in the post-World War II history of his department, initially the Department of Zoology, then Department of Biology, then Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution, and most recently Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He facilitated the transition in the later 1950s from a departmental style that was somewhat authoritarian and centralized to its present egalitarian and participatory mode. Bart was low-key, soft spoken, thoughtful, creative, and a balanced observer and participant in departmental and campus affairs throughout his 40-plus years at UCLA. He served terms as chair of both the separate Zoology and Botany Departments and then helped facilitate their merger into a unified Biology Department. Bart was an important influence in the founding of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute and in the recruitment to the department of the first group of molecularly-oriented faculty before the separate Department of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology was formed.
Bart's wife Betty and mother of their two children, Bruce Bartholomew and Karen B. Searcy, often she accompanied Bart on many of his travels until her death in 1993. In 1994 Bart married Ruth L. Myers and the two of them traveled extensively and enjoyed painting. Ruth died in August 2006, a short period before Bart. Bart leaves his two children, Bruce Bartholomew and Karen B. Searcy, four grandchildren, Mulan B. Tarnas, Yuan Bartholomew, Brian Searcy, and Steven Searcy, and 3 great grandchildren Camden, Tristan, and Caiden. But in addition to his family, Bart leaves an academic legacy of many students, an administratively reorganized life sciences at UCLA, and a field of research in the biological sciences significantly transformed by his own research. He will be missed deeply and by many.
Malcolm S. Gordon
Henry Hespenheide
Kenneth A. Nagy
February 2007
Research Summary
(last updated by G. A. Bartholomew in 1989 and slightly updated in 2006 by Bruce Bartholomew)
My published research spans 63 years. During this interval I have dealt with many research topics and a variety of taxa, but the philo-sophy and orientation of my research activities has been consistent. I have attempted to combine laboratory and field studies of ecologically relevant aspects of the physiology and behavior of animals which are exposed to unusu-ally demanding aspects of the physical environment or which represent an extreme of specialization for the group. My area of scientific concern lies at the interface between physiology, behavior, and ecology. Although such an investigative area may appear diffuse and unfocused, it has a fundamental biological coherence at the organismic level because the problems it encom-passes are directly significant to the ecology or reproduction of the species being studied. In principle the research problems to which I address myself are defined by the performance of animals under natural conditions. There-fore, I try to remain flexible in approach and to some extent allow circum-stances to determine the particular animals to be worked on and then allow their ecology to influence the questions to be asked and the techniques to be employed. Persons conditioned to the procedures and traditions of non-ecologically oriented laboratory research may look askance at this position, but it is operationally effective if one is willing to learn new techniques, deal with diverse animal types, work in the field with improvised facilities, and spend the effort to acquire the knowledge of the literature needed to meet the standards for publication in several different fields of research.
I have concentrated my research in three environmental settings--deserts, oceanic islands, and tropical forests and savannahs. Because of the variety of taxa I have studied and the contrasting properties of the environmental settings in which I have worked, I have acquired a broadly comparative point of view which has allowed me to delineate both convergences and differences in the ways which dissimilar organisms meet similar problems. This in turn has afforded insights into the functional, ecological, and evolutionary aspects of adaptations.
My research interests have led to groups of publications on each of the following topics: (1) photoperiodic control of reproduction in birds, mammals, and reptiles; (2) reproductive cycles in mammals; (3) cardiac, respiratory, and metabolic studies of large reptiles; (4) water economy, electrolyte excretion, and respiration physiology in birds and mammals; (5) energetics of locomotion in mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects; (6) hibernation and estiva-tion in birds and mammals; (7) reproductive and social behavior in a variety of terrestrial and marine birds and marine mammals; (8) distribution and population dynamics of seals and sea lions; and (9) heat production, energetics, and locomotor behavior of insects.
In each of these areas, except for mammalian and reptilian locomotion, I have also published substantial review papers. In my publications I have attempted to combine physiology, behavior, and ecology into a single functional package that is closely linked to the performance of animals under natural conditions.
Specific scientific contributions that have been widely cited in the literature include (a) the first demonstration of physiological control of rates of change of body temperature in reptiles; (b) pioneering studies of daily and seasonal dormancy in birds (caprimulgids, swifts, and colies) and mammals (heteromyid rodents and megachiropteran bats); (c) pioneering studies of water economy in desert birds; (d) the first detailed physical analyses of vocal communication in non-primate social mammals; (e) conver-gent patterns of energetics in endothermic insects and heterothermic mammals; (f) analysis of polygyny in marine mammals; (g) cost of locomotion and load carrying in ants; and (h) the energetics of hovering flight in humming birds and sphinx moths.
A number of my papers have been republished and widely disseminated for teaching purposes. A few examples will suffice. An article on desert ground squirrels is now a Scientific American offprint and sold from 12,000 to 16,000 copies a year for over a decade. An article on "Ecology and Protohominids" has sold over 10,000 copies as a separate and has been reprinted in several books, most recently in "Readings in Sociobiology". Three of my papers are included in different volumes of "Benchmark Papers in Animal Behavior" - Vol. 2, Territory (1974), edited by A.W. Stokes, and Vol. 4; External construction by Animals (1976), edited by N.E. Collias and E.C. Collias; and Behavioral Thermoregulation (1979), edited by E. Satinoff.
Like most students of non-applied biology I earn my living as a teacher. I consider teaching to be an important, perhaps the most important part, of my contributions to science. To date, 42 persons have obtained their doctorates under my supervision and most of them are now members of leading universities both in the U.S. and abroad.
I am co-author of two textbooks, one in physiology, the other in general zoology. In addition I have produced 30 educational films on aspects of animal behavior and the fauna and flora of Galapagos Islands for use in university level courses.
Annual Research Symposium Dedicated to Dr. George Bartholomew
The Bartholomew Fellowship for Field Biology
Generously endowed by Ruth Bartholomew and George Bartholomew, our distinguished Professor
Emeritus, this fund provides a summer fellowship ($6500) and research
support for the top applicant in ecology, evolutionary biology, and/or conservation biology whose research has
a significant field component. Eligible students must already have advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. Thus, one
student per summer will receive the "Bartholomew Fellowship", additional students will receive Bartholomew
Research Grants to support research expenses
If you wish to make a contribution to honor our colleague, friend and educator, you may do so by clicking here