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Biographical
Sketch
Link
to Walter's website
As a kid, Walter Tschinkel was considered a little weird
because he liked bugs and stuff, and looked at pond slime
through his microscope. The suspicions of society were confirmed
when he grew up into a weird adult. Like many lucky biologists,
he never outgrew his youthful interests, but turned them
into his profession instead.
Born in wartime in the Sudeten-German area of Czechoslovakia,
he grew up in Texas, Alabama and Connecticut, attending
Wesleyan, a small men’s college for small men. Graduate
school took him to the University of California at Berkeley
where, between picketing, pottery, backpacking, photography
and getting married, he earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in comparative
biochemistry (whatever that is) with a focus on chemical
communication in beetles. Upon finishing his Ph.D., he packed
his new wife and 5 pounds of halvah into his ’46 Ford
V-8 convertible and headed for a postdoctoral stint at Cornell.
After a year of teaching at Rhodes University in South Africa,
he finally came permanently to roost at Florida State University,
where he is currently the R.O. Lawton Distinguished Professor
and the Menzel Professor of Biological Science. Thirty-seven
years of research on diverse aspects of the social biology
of fire ants and other ants has allowed him to pretend to
know something about these fascinating creatures and their
ways. The Big Question that Walter is trying to answer through
his research is, How do the thousands of ants that make
up a colony manage to function as a single entity, a superorganism?
How do colonies of fire ants interact on an ecological scale?
He recently published the definitive book on fire ant social
biology. In 2001, he traveled to the Antarctic only to discover
that the only ants there were in the name.
Walter’s wife and daughter are both smarter than
he is, but he is quite a bit stronger. He is one of the
few people who can do body-flanges (push-ups with arms fully
extended forward), and holds the record for the number of
Sunray Venus Clams dug in a single breath-hold dive. Rather
late in life, he discovered that he enjoyed digging holes,
a pleasure that suited his growing interest in ant nest
architecture. In one hour, he can dig a six-foot hole wide
enough to swing a shovel in. Outside of science, Walter
is an accomplished woodworker and makes both furniture and
gadgets for his research. A world-class scrounge, he has
paid for very little of the lumber he uses, and can spot
a scroungable cherry tree from over a quarter of a mile
away. He is also an accomplished photographer and artist,
and has exhibited in galleries in California, Vermont, Minnesota,
Connecticut and Oregon, as well as in his own office and
hall.
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