Hi everyone,
I have some sad news to report today - Dr. Keith Hobson, from the University of Western Ontario, has passed. He was 70, and apparently succumbed to a very recently-diagnosed terminal illness. Keith has had an enormous impact on the science of monarchs over the years. Today, I'll point out some of his major contributions, as a bit of a tribute to him.
First, his official obituary is here (link). If you haven't heard of him until now, you can be forgiven for that, because of a couple of things. First, he wasn't strictly a researcher of monarchs, in fact his research spanned a huge range of different taxonomic groups, and even disciplines. Of the astounding 650 career publications he had, I'd say that less than 5% were based on monarchs, if that. Second, he wasn't someone that was in the news a lot over his research, even from those studies of his that did focus on the more newsworthy monarchs. Compared to say, the late Lincoln Brower (which is a fair comparison, since they were both icons), who was often interviewed by media and journalists, Keith had a more quiet profile.
The research that Keith conducted over his career was without a doubt, trail-blazing, and transformative. Keith specialized in a very sophisticated laboratory procedure whereby he could examine tissues of animals or plants, and tell where they came from in North America, based on the isotopes of hydrogen or carbon in them. This process allows researchers to then draw maps of where their specimens had migrated from, for example, and all without needing to do any kind of radio tracking or tagging. This was ground-breaking, and Keith literally wrote the book on this. Literally, as in, Keith wrote a book describing the process and its use in research!
This isotope work was Keith's thing, and, he was the go-to guy for researchers everywhere who wanted to include him in their projects, because he was the one who could take your samples, work his magic, and tell you where the animals came from. This is one of the reasons he has so many scientific publications. Over the years, he collaborated with hundreds of researchers, and provided that element of expertise to the various projects. These projects ranged from understanding where birds migrate to and from, understanding the foraging patterns of bears, and importantly for us, helping to figure out where monarchs fly to and from.
As a scientist, I can't help but be impressed with his career resume and overall productivity, even in his later years as a scientist. His google scholar profile lists 11 peer-reviewed publications just this year alone (the year he became ill, on top of everything). For most scientists, getting 3-4 peer-reviewed publications per year is considered productive. In other words, Keith was insanely productive, right up until the end. In fact, just a few months before he passed, I was asked to review his latest manuscript, and I'm happy to report that it was officially accepted for publication as of this morning. I believe his collaborators on the project are seeing it through to completion. It was/is another important contribution to the study of monarch migration, and, it addresses important questions about their nectar and lipid accumulation along the fall flyway. Keith had most recently been using his isotope procedure to figure out exactly where the monarchs were getting their lipids, kind of like asking where a traveler stops for gas on a long trip, by examining their gasoline. Keith knew, that by knowing where the important "gas-stations" are for monarchs, we can then try to protect them.
Ironically, one of Keith's most significant publications in the monarch world was one that was later found to be wrong! Way back in the late 1990s, Keith and his good colleague and collaborator, Len Wassenaar, published two papers that attempted to delineate where the core breeding range was for monarchs in North America. For this, the researchers had collected monarchs at the winter colonies in Mexico, during one winter in 1997, and then used the isotope procedure to figure out where they had come from. Their results indicated that the vast majority of them came from the central part of the Midwest, which is a region dominated by farmlands. A map from that paper is below, which, at the time, really made an impact on researchers, and much research, for years to come afterward. This one study is where the idea came from that the monarchs are so dependent on milkweeds in farm fields, and by extension, why so many people freaked out when the farmers began using roundup to remove the milkweeds from their (GMO) crops.
It turns out that these findings, and this map, were wrong, or at least, an oversimplification. It turns out that the "core" breeding range is not simply the Midwest, but it in fact shifts from year to year, to different regions around the breeding range, likely because of year-to-year changes in weather conditions and plant growth. This was found by other researchers (Flockhart et al. 2017), who has used a similar isotopic approach to find the natal grounds of monarchs collected over 40 years! It turns out that the year in which Keith's people had collected their specimens (1997), just happened to be the one year where the core region was the Midwest. And, with more specimens, the Flockhart study revealed that the Midwest is actually not as important as we once thought, based on Keith's earlier study. I had done a blog on the Flockhart study a while back (link here).
If you get the sense from reading this that I was one of Keith's biggest fans, it was because I was. I've had many conversations with Keith over the years, about monarch (and bird) migration, and the thing I'll always remember about him (and what I respected most about him) was his scientific objectivity. This is a dying art these days, which is unfortunate. What I mean by this is that Keith simply reported what the science showed, and what his data showed, with no spin, no bias, and no agenda. He was no nonsense, and believed that conservation decisions should be based on data and evidence. I found this refreshing, because in the world of monarchs, there is so much going on that runs counter to this mantra.
Speaking of that, Keith and I both lamented the recent decision by the Canadian government to list monarchs as federally endangered in Canada, based solely on the size of the wintering colonies in Mexico. Keith was not happy with this move (like me), because he too recognized that the overall breeding population in Canada is doing well, and, that the size of the winter colonies is not a good reflection of the breeding numbers, especially in a country that is 3000 miles away from Mexico. I recall that he was annoyed that no one from the Canadian government had even included him or certain other knowledgeable butterfly researchers in this decision.
Back to his isotope work, now that he is gone, I wonder if anyone will pick up the torch, so to speak, and fill this void in the science world. He was THE GUY who would help people find out where their animals came from, or went. I suspect there are many of his colleagues out there who had been working with him even recently, and who now have unfinished projects using his data and samples. Maybe, these projects will continue to be published with his name included, i.e., posthumously, as the study of monarch lipids will soon be.
As you can see, Keith leaves behind a tremendous legacy, which is something that all scientists (and me) aspire to do. The problem is, Keith did it so well, that his example is almost unattainable to match.
Rest in peace, Keith.
***************************************************************************************************
Direct link to this blog entry:
****************************************************************************************************