OBITUARY
JOHN FREDERICK EISENBERG: 1935?2003
Dr. John F. Eisenberg, scientist, teacher, and mentor of
remarkable intellectual breadth, died Sunday, 6 July 2003, at his
home in Bellingham, Washington. He was 68. John?s in-
defatigable spirit, contagious passion for knowledge, and sheer
scientific brilliance earned him a reputation as one of the
foremost mammalian biologists in the world. He lived his life
with passion and a fierce sense of purpose, and was a remarkably
colorful and unforgettable personality. John was a Fellow of the
Animal Behavior Society and the New York Zoological Society,
as well as recipient of the C. Hart Merriam Award, the highest
research honor bestowed by the American Society of Mammal-
ogists. In 2001 he was the corecipient of the Archie F. Carr
Medal award by the University of Florida for his contributions to
wildlife conservation. Eisenberg wrote more than 150 major
scientific publications on the ecology, behavior, and evolution
of mammals. In biological circles, he was recognized as a ??big
picture?? person. His ability to synthesize diverse knowledge
culminated in the publication of The Mammalian Radiations:
An Analysis of Adaptation, Ecology, and Behavior, a book
published in 1982 by the University of Chicago Press. He
completed the encyclopedic 3-volume Mammals of the Neo-
tropics in 2000 with coauthor Kent Redford.
John was born in Everett, Washington, the 1st of 2 sons of
Otto and Bernice nee Sessions Eisenberg. It was a close-knit
family. Everett was then one of the great mill towns of the
Northwest, and John was drawn to wildlife and fishing with his
father, brother, and uncles Carl and Boots. If John wasn?t born
with a fierce sense of independence and individualism, he
doubtless learned those qualities from his roving, adventurous
uncles. He became a compulsive reader at a young age, and
frequently visited Everett?s library and its little zoo, a legacy
from Franklin Delano Roosevelt?s New Deal. For a 6th grade
class project, he drew a very large, complex plan for a zoo,
which included many design features attuned to proper
husbandry. A turning point in his youth was the discovery of
a magazine article that showed how to build a live trap from
a quart juice can and a mousetrap. He began trapping local
rodents, which he observed as pets. It became a lasting passion.
John worked in several mills during the summer to put
himself through college. One of his favorite stories took place
the summer he worked as a ??sorter?? at Walton?s plywood mill.
The 1st day on the job was going well, but when the saws
began to buzz after lunch a piercing scream rose above the
drone. ??I was sure someone had fallen into the blade,?? and he
rushed to an old millhand to help. ??Never mind, son,?? hollered
the bemused worker. ??It?s only old Gus. He?s deaf and has the
piles. Can?t hear himself when he?s in the crapper.??
John decided early in life to break with the family tradition, go
to college, and escape from life in the mill town. It was not
a decision based on disdain, for John identified strongly with his
roots in the working class, and retained a soft place for ??the
common man?? throughout his life. He enrolled at Washington
State University at Pullman, where Helmut K. Buechner was
one of his instructors. There he married Ellen Franzen. After
graduating with honors, he was accepted to graduate school in
zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did
his master?s degree and Ph.D. under Peter Marler, who was
heading up a new program in ethology. He published one of his
John Eisenberg in his later years at the University of Florida.
(Photographer unknown.)
429
Journal of Mammalogy, 86(2):429?437, 2005
graduate student projects, The social organizations of mammals,
as a monograph in the Handbuch der Zoologie. John?s theses on
social organization of Peromyscus and comparative ethology of
heteromyid rodents represented a progression of syntheses that
continued throughout his life.
In 1962 John took his 1st academic position as an assistant
professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia
(UBC) in Vancouver. During the next 2 years he began his
??stable of graduate students?? and expanded the taxonomic
scope of his research with studies of insectivores and spider
monkeys. In 1964, he left UBC to join the zoology faculty at the
University of Maryland, where a strong program in ethology
was developing. John was immediately drawn to the National
Zoo, where the recently retired curator, Ernest P. Walker, had
assembled an eclectic collection of small mammals. He was at
the right place at the right time. Theodore H. Reed, Director of
the National Zoo, had been toying with the idea of hiring
a scientist to oversee scientific studies of the animal collection.
When the lean and articulate 30-year-old Eisenberg paid him
a visit, Reed knew he had met the person who could make it
happen. In 1965 Reed hired John as the National Zoo?s Resident
Scientist. Eisenberg?s advent at the zoo was a pivotal event in the
zoo?s history, and his subsequent adjunct status at the University
of Maryland opened the zoo?s doors to graduate studies.
Reed made good his promises. John agreed to collect live
animals for the zoo in exchange for the privilege to conduct
fieldwork overseas, and Reed assigned both the zoo?s best
secretary (Wy Holden) and most experienced keeper (Gene
Maliniak) to John?s fledgling Scientific Research Department.
A large room on the top of the reptile house and the vast
dungeonlike basement of the lion house were soon filled with
splendidly crafted cages containing an assortment of caviomorph
rodents, dasyurid marsupials, tenrecs, moonrats, and soleno-
dons. At its peak, 3 full-time keepers took care of the live-animal
collection. It was a place where ??things went bump in the night,??
and graduate students stayed after hours to behold the strange
creatures that smelled like rotten garlic or stridulated with quills.
The plumbing system in the late lion house was medieval at best,
and those making pilgrimages to see the collection learned to
promptly evacuate the building at 1000 h. That was when the
keepers flushed the drains of the large cat cages upstairs.
John organized or was co-principle investigator in 3
international field projects during his Smithsonian years.
Shortly after he arrived, he paid a visit to Ed Gould at Johns
Hopkins University, saw his tenrec collection, and learned of
his studies in Madagascar. Ed invited him to become a partner.
John packed his young family to Madagascar to join Ed for
fieldwork and collecting. They returned with more tenrecs, and
eventually an assortment of Malagasy carnivores arrived at the
zoo, including a fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), fanalokas (Fossa
fossana), and ring-tailed mongooses (Galidia elegans). All-
night stints at the zoo making observations became routine. At
the same time, Maliniak?s painstaking attentions to husbandry
generated new insights into tenrec reproductive biology. When
John and Ed published their monograph, The Tenrecs, they
drew parallels between the societies of insectivores and
elephants. It was clear that the work was a segue to studies
of other mammalian orders.
As the leader and coordinator of the Ceylon and Venezuela
projects, John inspired his coworkers and students by example
and compelling personality. His old mentor from Washington
State University, Hal Buechner, was by then a Smithsonian
ecologist. Buechner secured Public Law 480 funds for the first 2
years of the Ceylon project, but in 1967 John became principle
investigator and again packed up his family to join his students
and coworkers overseas. He orchestrated research collabora-
tions in 4 protected areas, including primate studies with
Suzanne Ripley, Gil Manley, and Ted Grand; elephant studies
with Fred Kurt; and botanical investigations by Ray Fosberg,
Dietrich Mueller-Dombois, and Marcel and Annette Hladik. He
also taught courses at the University of Ceylon, where he
recruited Ceylonese counterparts for each project, almost all of
whom received at least master?s degrees for their work.
Although John burned the candle at both ends, the Ceylon
Project was a particularly intense and turbulent chapter of his
life. He was working at full throttle, publishing nonstop, giving
papers, and managing the project. His students and colleagues
back home eagerly awaited news from the field, which could be
counted upon to stir the imagination. One day a box of 35-mm
slides arrived with a telling picture. Hunkered before a pile of
elephant dung and grinning maniacally was our advisor poised
John Eisenberg in Madagascar during a trip with Ed Gould in 1966.
(Photograph by Edwin Gould.)
430 JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY Vol. 86, No. 2
to bite into the giant road apple. A poster made from that slide
decorated the department for many years. Inevitably, the
project took its toll on the marriage, and John returned to the
states vowing to dedicate more time to family and home. John?s
lifelong friend, Gene Wood recalls John?s solemn declaration,
??I?m going to spend more time with the family, be a better
father, and buy a lawnmower. And maybe I?ll even become
a volunteer fireman.?? Not long afterward, in his last woeful act
of domestic responsibility before moving out of the house, he
cut off 2 toes with the new mower. Gene recalls going to the
hospital, and finding John on a gurney being questioned by an
officious nurse. Nurse: ??Mr. Eisenberg, you lost 2 toes, but
there was only 1 in your shoe.?? John: ??That?s correct.?? Nurse:
??Well, what happened to the other one??? With the character-
istic insouciance he reserved for such occasions John replied.
??Twinkles ate it!?? Indeed, the family cat had eaten the toe. A
week later John was late getting to a graduate student party, but
with bandaged foot and crutches he danced to Zorba the Greek.
The crutches knocked a few pictures to the floor, but the
students loved it.
The dissolution of John?s marriage in 1969 was a painful
experience. John retained custody of the children, Karl and
Elise, and threw himself into a number of projects. He
published his Ceylon findings, coedited the Smithsonian?s Man
and Beast Symposium with Wilton Dillon, and rekindled his
interest in the Neotropics. During this period he met Devra
Kleiman, who joined the departmental staff as a reproductive
biologist, and they married in 1971. Together they comanaged
the zoo?s research program, and enjoyed a productive pro-
fessional partnership. John?s 1st generation of graduate
students were starting to finish their degrees, and there was
no shortage of prospective students seeking to work with him.
John initiated the Symposia of the National Zoological Park,
and successfully lobbied for the hiring of a number of curators
who were professionally trained biologists. By the mid-1970s,
John had established his credentials internationally as a scientist
of extraordinary vision and energy. By then, the facilities in the
basement of the lion house were long gone, replaced by
a building reserved wholly for research and veterinary
medicine. Under Eisenberg?s leadership, the National Zoo
had become one of the foremost research zoos in the country,
and the Conservation and Research Center, which character-
ized his core intellectual values of field science, observation,
education, and scholarship, all in the most unpretentious
atmosphere, became the jewel in the zoo?s crown.
As a consequence, the zoo became a whistle stop for
a growing number of luminaries of the ??old guard???Heini
Hediger, Paul Leyhausen, Griff Ewer, Desmond Morris, and
Gerald Durrell to mention a few, and the house on 16th Street
NW became a frequent party venue and an oasis of sorts for
itinerant graduate students. Karl?s pet snakes and hamsters were
often ??at large,?? which fueled the family drama. John recounted
these episodes as a tragicomedic domestic saga, which didn?t
necessarily help matters, but were far more entertaining than any
creative essay one hears on National Public Radio.
John?s attraction to Latin America as a theater of mammalian
evolution grew. He published a monograph on spider monkey
communication, and launched Gene Montgomery and Mel
Sunquist, both seasoned radiotrackers, in their investigations of
2-toed and 3-toed sloth ecology on the Smithsonian?s field
station at Barro Colorado Island, Panama. In 1977 he initiated
the Venezuela Project, which continues today. At about the
same time, Reed promoted him to assistant director of the zoo?s
animal programs, and he began his grand synthesis of
mammalian evolution?The Mammalian Radiations: An Anal-
ysis of Adaptation, Ecology, and Behavior. He harnessed
himself to a deadline that few others could manage, but the
undertaking gave him great satisfaction. Even when socializ-
ing, his 1st order of business was to share his emerging ideas
and penciled graphs with his colleagues. The book was the
culmination of his work at the National Zoo.
In 1982, John accepted the Katharine Ordway Chair in
Ecosystem Conservation at the University of Florida (UF) in
Gainesville, where he held the title of Eminent Scholar. At this
juncture, Devra and John decided mutually to terminate their
marriage, but remained on good terms. The transition to the
university was natural, because many of his colleagues,
including Brian McNab, Ralph Wetzel, Hank Setzer, and
former postdoctoral student, John Robinson, were living in
Gainesville or were on the faculty. John married Brenda J.
Sigler a year later, and enjoyed many hours babysitting
grandchildren.
After reviewing the academic programs at UF, John asked,
??Where is the field school??? Finding that there wasn?t one, he
volunteered Mel Sunquist, Dick Franz, and himself to put
together a field techniques course on the Ordway Preserve. The
1st course was conducted in May 1984. It is still ongoing and
evolving, having trained more than 600 wildlife undergraduates
to date. John handled the small mammal trapping exercise, and
dazzled the students with his knowledge, folksy stories, and
ease with which he gently manipulated the tiny critters out of
the cloth bag for show and tell. They were equally impressed
with his yellow socks, which were pulled up over his cuffs and
reeked of rotten eggs; they were relieved to learn that dusting
one?s socks with sulfur powder was sound jungle lore rather
than treatment for athlete?s foot. John was the ??universal
donor?? to every biting, sucking, piercing, chewing insect
known to man and religiously used the powder in a valiant
effort to thwart the attacks of chiggers and ticks. Unfortunately,
he was still vulnerable to the flying beasts, which often left his
hands and face puffed up like a toad. An inveterate field man,
he never missed a field class during his time at UF.
The Ordway Chair had no teaching responsibilities, but John
loved to teach and never failed to captivate his audience. In
addition to Wildlife Techniques, John regularly taught
Mammalogy with Charles Woods, Wildlife Ecology, Mammals
of South America, Advanced Mammalogy, Behavioral and
Ecological Mammalogy, as well as the occasional course on
special topics. After a leave in Tasmania in 1990, for example,
John taught a course on Conservation of Carnivorous
Mammals, where thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus) and
Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus laniarius) figured prominently.
He also joined forces with Larry Harris to teach a course on
Biological Conservation in Africa, and he later taught a course
April 2005 431OBITUARY?JOHN FREDERICK EISENBERG
on Mammal Introductions with Mike Moulton. John?s daunting
knowledge of mammalian biogeography provided penetrating
insights into the impacts of introduced species.
John brought a remarkable presence to the classroom.
Shuffling in with his worn yellow lecture notes marked with
neatly penciled annotations, he would arrange his notes, and
pause to look over his reading glasses at the class. Then the
baritone voice began. He was the master narrator, weaving
together the pieces and characters, sometimes going to the
blackboard to produce a detailed map or animal sketch. The
lectures became stories, told with the eloquence that only John
could command. John?s dramatic flair and skills as a mimic
never failed him. During one mesmerizing lecture on mating
systems, John launched into a transcendental evocation of the
bull elk in rut, complete with bugling. When the lecture was
over, the class rose in a standing ovation.
Graduate students were frequent visitors to John?s office. He
never failed to awe them as he rattled off citations and then
turned to the books of his vast library. The glimpses, hints, and
other avenues of inquiry he suggested were often real nuggets.
What a resource he was. His door was always open, but his
approachability increased when university policy forced him to
smoke outside. With a cup of coffee in one hand and
a cigarette in the other, John could predictably be found in the
museum?s courtyard. Inevitably 1 or more students would stop
to ask a question between classes. John relished the intellectual
stimulation, and in this strange courtlike setting he truly was in
fine form. No matter how mundane the subject, his views were
never commonplace. Except perhaps, for his attire, where it
was not unusual to see a bit of belly or the crack of his
derriere.
John?s depth and breadth made him a valued committee
member, and he willingly served on more than 100 graduate
student committees from departments across campus. To this
service must be added his own students, and he graduated 20
master?s and 19 doctoral students at UF. His students were an
international assemblage, representing at least 15 countries.
No account of Eisenberg would be complete without
mentioning his stories. Whether a personal account of some
trial of life (fighting to retain sanity while stranded on the
Orinoco), or a woeful tale of someone?s grief (the bodice-ripping
tale of the little green frog in the bathing tank on the llanos),
Eisenberg was a consummate storyteller. A telling tribute to
John?s persona took place in 1978, during a trip to the mammal
meetings in Athens, Georgia. After a long day?s drive, John and
his students checked into a motel, had a quick wash, and
convened at the restaurant for dinner and much needed libations.
The place was empty except for 2 women dining several tables
away. Our mentor sipped bourbon, reflected somewhat
surrealistically on the day?s ho-hum events, parodied the topics
of the meeting?s forthcoming presentations, and digressed on the
origin of Newton?s famous quotation about ??standing on the
shoulders of giants.?? As we were leaving the room, the 2 women
intercepted our group. Since John seasoned his speech
generously with expletives, we expected the worst. ??Sir, I
would like to introduce myself and my daughter,?? drawled the
woman pleasantly. She confessed that they had been ??shame-
lessly eavesdropping.?? ??My daughter and I found your
comments to be most enlightening. I want to thank you, and
wish you the best of luck.?? John took her proffered hand, and in
his most courtly demeanor responded, ??Why Madam, that?s
most kind of you to say.??
John?s gift of oratory was complimented by an omnipresent
confidence. His captivating presence in public instantly stood
him apart. Even when he was enjoying his 5th glass of Jim
Beam, mastery of diction never seemed to fail him. Under those
circumstances, John became a 1-man show who could hold forth
on a remarkable variety of topics. At these times, he was as
likely to recite Wagnerian opera auf Deutsch, as to discuss the
war of the states, or interpret biblical parable. Dick Thorington
recalls a trip with John to Corrientes, Argentina. A family friend
had advised Dick to make a courtesy call on a friend, who
happened to be the daughter of the former Argentine
Ambassador to the United States. The young woman cautiously
accepted Dick?s invitation to dinner, saying her sister would
accompany her. Dick asked John to join them. ??Are you sure
you want me there??? asked John, forecasting the possibility of
embarrassing misbehavior. ??Of course I want you there,??
replied Dick, and together they met the sisters in an upscale
restaurant. As they were enjoying dessert the Ambassador made
an unannounced appearance?under the polite pretext of being
in the neighborhood, but obviously to check out the gringos.
When the small talk was over, the subject somehow shifted to
law. In Dick?s words, ??John launched into a most fascinating,
learned discourse on the evolution of Napoleonic law.?? John?s
erudition was astounding, and the ambassador?s wonderment
was palpable.
An obituary can hardly do justice to John?s life, which had
more than its share of discovery, adventure, and original ideas,
not to mention a long procession of friends who shared in the
journey and its many dramas. He touched many lives. His
profession and his personal life were intricately interwoven,
John in the field doing what he loved most (Hato Masaguaral,
Venezuela, circa 1980). (Photograph by Don Wilson.)
432 JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY Vol. 86, No. 2
which was often frustrating to his family, and endeared him to
his friends. But all who knew him well were enriched by the
experience. When Ernst Mayr asked the young Dick
Thorington about his new associates at the Smithsonian, Dick
reeled off the names, and finished with John Eisenberg. ??Now
there?s a true scholar,?? remarked Mayr. We will all miss that
scholar, and his extraordinary persona, but his inspiration will
never leave us.
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CHRIS WEMMER
Department of Birds and Mammals
California Academy of Sciences
875 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA
chindwin@sbcglobal.net
MEL SUNQUIST
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation
P.O. Box 110430
Gainesville, FL 32611-0430, USA
sunquist@mail.ifas.ufl.edu
April 2005 437OBITUARY?JOHN FREDERICK EISENBERG