In Memoriam |
Corresponding author: David C. Culver ( dculver@american.edu ) Academic editor: Oana Teodora Moldovan
© 2017 David C. Culver.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Culver DC (2017) Kenneth A. Christiansen (1924–2017). Subterranean Biology 24: 53-61. https://doi.org/10.3897/subtbiol.24.22905
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One of the great speleobiologists and Collembola systematists, Ken Christiansen, died on November 26, 2017, at the age of 93. Ken was truly unique; no one who ever came in contact with him ever forgot him. A scholar and intellect of the first order, he always had time and enthusiasm for the work of his students and colleagues. His level of energy and enthusiasm was such that even into his 80’s, his colleague and fellow collembologist Louis Deharveng called him “Hurricane Ken” after a visit to Louis at the Paris Museum of Natural History. He touched the lives of generations of students at Grinnell College and the lives of generations of Collembola taxonomists and speleobiologists throughout the world.
One of the most formative influences on Ken’s life, surpassed only by his wife Phyllis and their four children, was his service in World War II in the U.S. Army Second Armored Infantry Division as a forward observer in the campaigns in Europe and North Africa. A genuine war hero and fierce anti-fascist, he was awarded a bronze star and an oak leaf cluster for bravery in combat. I once asked Ken what rank he achieved and he told me he was promoted to corporal three times! Anyone who believes the phrase that there are no atheists in a foxhole never met Ken and for many years he was famous at Grinnell for his atheism lecture.
Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Ken went to Boston University and Harvard University, and graduated with a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1951. His thesis (
While the winds of neo-Darwinism were blowing strongly in North America (especially at Harvard, the home institution of the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr), they were at best a faint breeze in continental Europe, the center of research on subterranean biology at the time. In a series of papers that continued for the next six decades (
It was also in the 1960’s that he initiated the study of the ecology of Hunters Cave in Iowa (
His work on evolution of cave animals was more than matched by his work on the taxonomy of cave animals. There are approximately 60 species of cave Collembola known from U.S. caves and he described nearly 50 of them! During the course of his career, he described species from all the major genera of Collembola occupying North American caves—Onychiurus (
Ken did not limit himself to the taxonomy of cave Collembola. He also described a number of non-cave dwelling species from the U.S. (
During his six decades at Grinnell, he introduced countless students to caves and cave biology, often in Hunter Cave. He introduced a number of students to research, and was an enthusiastic mentor to even the most unprepared student. Several of his students went on to get Ph.D’s and pursue research careers in ecology and evolutionary biology, including David Culver, Richard Seifert, and Mary Willson, He was also collaborator, mentor, and friend to generations of collembologists, and co-wrote papers with a number of colleagues, including Bellinger, Chen, Culver, de Gama, Li, Palacios-Vargas, Wang, and Zeppelini.
For anyone who has met Ken, a recitation of his academic achievements does not do justice to his influence or his character. Ken was enthusiastic in his support both of intellectual areas of interest, like cave biology and Collembola, and in those of us who shared these interests. Ken never claimed priority or seniority; he was the ideal colleague and mentor. He had an overall joie de vivre which infected those who came in contact with him. He had numerous interests outside of science, including acting in community theater, listening to opera, making wine, and studying history, especially military history. His enthusiasms and overall attitude are all the more remarkable for the many traumatic experiences in his wartime years, in a unit with high mortality. Without complaint or self pity, he kept these stresses and strains under control, with the support and understanding of his loving wife, Phyllis. I had the great fortune to be his student, colleague, and friend for more than 50 years. No one had a greater influence on me as a scientist or a person, and I am grateful to have known him. I am certainly not alone in this, and a little bit of Ken lives on in the best of each of us who knew him.