What is biodiversity & why does it matter?

Biodiversity refers to the number of species of organisms found in an area. This area can be as large as the planet Earth or as small as the hind gut of a termite (which houses a myriad of microorganisms to digest cellulose).

Of late, biologists are fervently working to preserve critical habitats and to document their species, spurred in part by the increasing influence of factors known to decrease biodiversity, such as habitat loss, introduced species, pollution, nonsustainable harvesting/exploitation and human indifference.

This symposium will showcase a few areas of current biodiversity research, specifically work with tropical butterflies and wasps, and it will present sobering assessment of the current status our planet’s ecosystems and the species they support.

Ultimately the continued success of humans, as a species, will depend upon the diversity of organisms we leave for future generations.

ABOUT THE BROTHER LUCIAN BLERSCH SYMPOSIUM
Organized by the School of Natural Sciences at St. Edward’s University, the event is free and open to the public. This symposium and a professorship in the School of Natural Sciences were endowed by a gift from J.B.N. Morris, hs ’48, ’52, and his family to honor Brother Lucian Blersch, CSC, a longtime professor of engineering at St. Edward’s who died in 1986.

Speakers

Allan W. Hook , PhD
Lucian Professor of Natural Sciences, St. Edward’s University

Hook, who organized this symposium, has taught at St. Edward’s since 1988. His research focuses on the behavior and biodiversity of solitary wasps in North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Australia. He has authored or coauthored nearly 40 papers on these subjects. Hook holds a BS in biology from the University of Maine, an MS in entomology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in zoology and entomology from Colorado State University.

Philip J. DeVries, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of New Orleans, La.

DeVries has a broad interest in comparative natural history, particularly that of tropical butterflies. His work includes two major field guides on the comparative biology of Costa Rican butterflies and over 100 research articles on insect diversity, ecology, phylogeny and evolution. The MacArthur, Dodge, Guggenheim and the National Science Foundations have supported his research, and he is active in development and production of natural history films and books on biodiversity and conservation. H DeVries has completed field research in Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Madagascar, Panama, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Belize, Argentina, Galapagos, Venezuela, Bolivia, Bhutan, China, Borneo, Australia, England and Germany. He is the author of What do Tropical Butterflies Tell us about Biodiversity? and The Butterflies of Costa Rica and Their Natural History. DeVries holds a BS from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD from the Department of Zoology at UT–Austin.

Eric R. Pianka, PhD
Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology, University of Texas at Austin

Pianka has taught evolutionary ecology at UT–Austin since 1968. During his academic career, he has sponsored 18 graduate students and published more than a hundred scientific papers, four of which became “Citation Classics,” as well as dozens of invited articles, book chapters, and 16 books including an autobiography. His textbook Evolutionary Ecology, first published in 1974 and currently in its sixth edition, has been translated into Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish and is currently being translated into Greek. Pianka has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, and he has presented hundreds of invited lectures at most of the world’s major academic institutions as well as several important plenary lectures. He earned a BA from Carleton College in 1960, a PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1965, and the DSc degree for his collected works in 1990 from the University of Western Australia. He was a postdoctoral with Robert H. MacArthur at Princeton University from 1966 to 1968.