For Wolfgang Wickler on his 65th Birthday

Dear Wolfgang,

On the occasion of your 65th birthday I wish not only to convey to you my warmest congratulations but also to express to you my personal thanks, as well as that o f all students of animal behavior for your numerous orignal contributions to etholoky. As one of KONRAD I,ORI:NZ’S first students, and later as his assistant and successor at Seewiesen, you have been primarily a ‘classical’ ethologist. Like LORE~NZ, you have always been particularly interested in the evolutionary aspects of behavior. Species-specific, innate behavior patterns were of special interest to you but, at the same time, you have always stressed the importance of individually acquired behaviors. Also like K. LORIINZ, you have never hesitated to compare animal with human behavior and to speculate to what extent ancestral roots might have contributed to human behavior.

Although you focused in your early work on species of a number of fish families (e.g. blennies and cichlids), you later extended your studies to a wide variety of taxa, including mammals, birds, amphibians, orthopterans, beetles, fhes, spiders, and crustaceans. Not being an ethologist myself, I do not feel quahfied to review this work

critically. This is particularly true of your work on mimicry, monogamy, duetting in birds, and culturally transmitted behavior, subjects to which you have devoted a number of valuable publications. You have never hesitated to suggest unorthodox interpretations which, even when unsuccessful, have led to stimulating discussions.

In addition to several monographs and research papers, you have published about a dozen books, most of them somewhat ‘popular’, that is with the objective of making the findings o f ethology available to a non-speciahst audience. In this you have been most successful, owing to your didactic talent.

Perhaps your potentially most influential publication, although rather neglected was your contribution to the third edition (1967) of HI:,B~:R~~R’s Evolution der ORanismen. Here, under the title ‘Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung und Phylogenetik’, you attempted to clarify the evolutionary history of behavior elements. This review is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it contains a detailed analysis of 171 publications on behavior, at that time by far the best survey of current behavior literature. The information is organized by themes - a first attempt at such a classification in behavior literature. Special attention is given to a discrimination between homologous and convergent similarities, putative recapitulation, differences in homologous behaviors of related species, the information content of signals, and duetting of mates, to mention only a few topics. You at once recopized the importance o f the recently (1 964) published papers by HAMII,TON and undertook a detailed analysis o f the evolution of altruism with a strong emphasis on inclusive fitness. I d o not know who was the first to make the observation that behavior is very often ‘the pacemaker of evolution’, but I adopted this metaphor from your 1967 paper. All in all, I learned a great deal from this excellent summary.

Your contributions to education should not remain unmentioned, indeed they are o f considerable importance. Together with collaborators, you produced about 50 teaching films (with text), mostly on fish behavior. Since 1967 you have been editor-in- chief of the %eitdny,fir 7;ptp!ychoIoRip, (since 1986 Etbolog$. Since 1976 you served as professor at the University of Munich. Sixty-seven theses for university degrees (including 25 PhD theses) were, from 1968 on, completed under your direction. In 1975, you were appointed director at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Verhaltens- physiologie in Seewiesen.

My personal experience has taught me that at 65, one has completed only two- thirds of one’s productive career. This gives me the opportunity to wish you, Wolfgang, excellent health and continued Freude am Schaffen for the next third of your active life. Your beloved science o f ethology will be the beneficiary.

Yours, ~IRNST MAYR

Museum nf Comparative ZoolnhT, The Agassiz Museum, [{award Llniversity, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In old friendship,

2 Aupst, 1996