autobiography

Athol John McLachlan 1939-?


I was born in Johannesburg in 1939, did my schooling in SA and after completing my undergraduate work at Wits University, moved north, with a BSc Hons in Zoology, to what was then Rhodesia. This was part of the fulfillment of a long standing interest in tropical Africa and the wilderness, sparked by a school trip to Europe. In those days, such a trip necessitated overnight stops at several places in Africa. Europe had little effect on me but I never forgot the excitement of strange and wonderful tropical Africa. In Rhodesia I took up a post as Nuffield Research Fellow at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. My PhD work was on the huge newly created Lake Kariba, on the Zambesi River. This part of Africa was one of the last truly wild places on earth, full of elephants, buffalo, leopard, crocodiles and many others. Here I studied the responses of the aquatic insect populations to the new lake habitat. This was a purely ecological project involving field work carried out at the remote Nuffield research station on the Mwenda River and it was here that I came under the influence of Arthur Cain and his Oxford research student Peter Jarman. This contact started me thinking about evolutionary ecology, in which we were quite well grounded by B. I. Balinski at Wits, but evolution did not become my major research and teaching interest until many years later.


I obtained a PhD for the Kariba work from the University of London in 1967 and after a short spell of undergraduate teaching at University College in Rhodesia, continued my northward migration to take up an appointed as lecture in Zoology at the newly created Chancellor College of the University of Malawi. This was a good move. The Zoology department at the time was chaired by Margaret Kalk, one of my teachers from Wits. In her department, teaching was informed by a strong research program which was not then, and probably is not now, the standard model in the universities of tropical Africa. My personal research was on the ecology of mud dwelling insects colonizing the newly re-filled Lake Chilwa, which had just been through one of its periodic dry phase. This work formed part of a multidisciplinary research program to study all aspects of the ecology of recovering Lake Chilwa and was an exciting time. Here my interest in transient aquatic habitats, started on the fluctuating shoreline at Lake Kariba, was reinforced and lead to a lifetime of work on tropical rain pools. These tiny habitats, in the footprints of ungulates and elephants and on rock surfaces, proved ideal for the study of temporary waters and, in contrast to giant lakes such as Kariba and Chilwa, are easily manipulated experimentally. Happily, the rain pool work necessitated return trips to Chancellor College for the rest of my working life. These visits were funded by a British Council academic link, by the Royal Society, by the Percy Sladen fund. Chancellor College generously made me welcome all those years and provide housing for my stays. All of this Africa work was suffused with a sense of  adventure.


In 1970 I won a lectureship in the Zoology Department at Newcastle University, in the UK where I remained until retirement at the age of sixty-five in 2004. Here I came under another influence - that of  my colleague Alec Panchen, which lead at last, to an active interest in evolution. I clearly recall the tipping-point at a guest lecture by the late John Maynard Smith suddenly revealing to me the evolutionary way of seeing the world. Looking back in it, I see that my life’s work falls roughly into the time in Rhodesia and Malawi when I was interested in ecology and the time in the UK where my interest focused on evolution with African rain pools forming a bridge between the two. A division of this kind coincides with work on juvenile stages in Africa and on adults in the UK. The juvenile mud dwellers are composed almost entirely of insect larvae.  These do little but eat, 24 hours a day throughout the spring and summer months. The adult part of the life-cycle is quite different, being devoted almost exclusively to mating. Hence the adult comes into the realm of sexual selection theory. The insects concerned are largely chironomid midges. Like may flies, chironomids do not need to feed as adults, spending their brief lives on the wing, fuelled essentially by energy sequestered from the larva. Mating takes place in a mating swarm with males forming the swarm, typically numbering thousands of individuals, which are sought by patrolling females. Such swarm-based mating systems are little studied and provide an excellent opportunity for original research. I have chosen to stay with chironomids all my life; ever since my undergraduate research project at Wits. Concentrating on a single taxon has left me free to change research questions at will. The alternative, chosen by some of my colleagues, is to stick to one topic and addressing it in a variety of animal species. Both approaches have advantages and drawbacks.


Looking back on all this, what do I see as my scientific achievements? In my own eyes, my most serious flaw is that I have a natural antipathy to scientific meetings, which is a bad thing carrying consequences, such as missing the opportunity of being seen by colleagues. We all really need a face to which a name can be attached. On the other hand, I think I have done some things right. First, I have been active in publishing my work, nearly all in leading peer-reviewed learned journals. I managed to resist pressures to give up research in favour of the writing of endless grant application for research students and post doctoral fellows. The ethos, well entrenched in universities, of removing experience scientists from the laboratory to become bureaucrats in this way has always seemed to me a strange thing to do to science. This fact has an important bearing on the postgraduate/supervisor relationship which, at its best, is a major source of innovation in our society. More often that not however, the supervisor is typically not directly involved in the students work. His/her seminal role is to provide the initial hypothesis to be tested and the methods required to do this. At the end of the students programme a great deal of help is usually given with interpretation and presentation of the data. But since the supervisor has not been closely involved in the collection of data, it must be taken at face value. But all data is not of equal value, a fact invisible to all but the student. I recall a senior colleague boasting, during a senior common room discussion, that he was good at seeing patterns in the data of his research students. But he was put out when I asked how he assessed the reliability of the data. This raises the spectre of how often we scientist build vast edifices on the shaky foundations of poor data.

My resistance in this matter may have something to do with my late father, a chemist who as a school boy I observed becoming office bound and as a consequence, never entering his laboratory. Fortunately, my research was not costly in monetary terms, so that I could remain active on a shoestring. My work has been of curiosity driven rather than of the problem solving type. I suspect my attitude was formed partly by a reaction to the unimaginative, strongly problem orientated fisheries research programmes to which I was exposed during the Kariba/Chilwa period.

I am a great believer in teaching informed by active personal research. Because of this I was able to bring my research attitudes and insights directly to undergraduates and research students. Coupled with constant reading to keep abreast of the wider field, this meant that I never gave the same lecture twice, not even at first year level. My teaching efforts paid off in a good response from students. In all, I published 58 original research papers and several major reviews. In 1992 I was a warded a Doctor of Science (DSc) for my research efforts by the University of London. Teaching contributions are not recognised by most universities and certainly not, in my experience, by Newcastle University.

Reflection on my school and undergraduate days reminds me of how precarious the start of ones career is. At school I was poor at chemistry and physics and struggled until a textbook on zoology was discovered by my head-master. It was at that point that I took of and was encouraged by the school to peruse my own studies on the subject. I was the only boy permitted to break bounds at will to go exploring the veld, collect snakes and make personal observations on the complex communities inhabiting abandoned termite mounds. My father insisted that I study maths, which I did not excel at but matriculate in that subject made it possible to enter Wits University which was a fine experience. Whenever time permitted I pursued my interests in natural history with my brother Ian, in the veld around Johannesburg. Without my fathers intervention at that critical time my life would have been very different.


I married twice. My first wife, Sandra, was a fellow undergraduate at Wits and shared much of my working life. My second wife, Charlotte, is an artist with strong roots on the Isle of Mull where we live after my retirement. She has a studio downs stairs and I a laboratory upstairs. 

Influential text books

My development as a biologist owns much to three outstanding, terrific books. In the order in which I discovered them they are:

Stephen Jay Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Mary Jane West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution and Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution.


references

Gould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Harvard University Press, London.

West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Conway Morris, S. (2003). Life's Solution. Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.