JENS THORVALD HØEG, RECIPIENT OF THE CRUSTACEAN

J OURNAL OF C RUSTACEAN B IOLOGY, 34(2), 289-291, 2014
JENS THORVALD HØEG, RECIPIENT OF THE CRUSTACEAN SOCIETY
EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AWARD
Ole S. Møller ∗
Department of Veterinary Disease Biology, Parasitology and Aquatic Diseases, University of Copenhagen,
Stigbøjlen 7, DK-1870 Frederiksberg C., Denmark
DOI: 10.1163/1937240X-00002222
Jens Thorvald Høeg is one of the most prominent researchers
in Carcinology in the latter part of the 20th and first part
of the 21st century. His work on the biology, morphology,
evolution, and life cycle of Rhizocephala has been ground
breaking and has shed new light on numerous aspects
of these highly interesting and very important parasitic
crustaceans.
Jens did his Master’s and Ph.D. theses under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jørgen Lützen, at what was known
as Institute of Comparative Anatomy at the University of
Copenhagen. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1985, and after
a period with postdoc stipends, he was hired as assistant professor at the then Zoological Institute, University of Copenhagen in 1990. He received tenure in 1996 and since then he
has worked at what is now known as the Biological Institute,
University of Copenhagen.
Early in his studies, Jens became an ardent Hennigian
Cladist/Phylogenetic Systematist by attending lectures given
by some of the scientists who introduced the Hennigian
methods in Denmark; Professors Niels Peder Kristensen and
Niels Bonde. Ever since, Jens has been teaching students
about monophyly and the beauties and strengths of being
able to reduce all tree related discussions to three-taxon
statements. In general, dissemination has always been a very
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important and major part of Jens’ work and scientific career.
He has taught hundreds of classes in invertebrate morphology; mostly in arthropods, but also in birds and most other
vertebrate groups. In 1992, Jens was awarded the prestigious
Faculty of Science “Excellence and Innovation in Teaching
Award” for his lectures in zoomorphology. No doubt, many
a young biologist from Copenhagen will recognize and remember some of the classic “Jensian analogies,” e.g., the
medieval knight’s suit of armor being analogous to the crustacean exoskeleton, a fly-by-wire comparison of F-16 fighters and insects, and the famous quote by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz on barnacles: “. . . nothing more than a
little shrimp-like animal, standing on its head in a limestone
house, and kicking food into its mouth.” Anyone who has
tried it, either in the field or in the lecture hall will confirm
that teaching together with Jens is an absolute pleasure.
Once, when Jens was teaching lessons in Zoology I on
decapod crustaceans, the subject of dissection was a crayfish
(normally Pacifastacus leniusculus). The students had just
had their specimens handed over when the power failed,
one of the most widespread power-outages ever to happen
in the Copenhagen metro area. Almost immediately, the
students started packing up to leave but were stopped by
Jens, who calmly told them to sit down, move closer to
the windows for better light, and watch the blackboard.
Jens then proceeded to fill the blackboard with drawings
of everything from germ layer formation to appendage
morphology and segmentation, all done in three colours
of chalk in free hand. A little loss of power and modern
aids like PowerPoint projectors is not enough to stop a true
carcinologist like Jens from his teaching!
Jens’ first publication was not, as most would probably
guess, on Crustacea; rather, it was a two page short note
relating how Jens had successfully bred Hymenochirus
boettgeri, African dwarf frogs, in his private home aquarium.
The journal was “Dansk Akvarie Blad” (Danish Aquarium
Magazine), but due to language, this journal never made it
into a broader audience.
Currently, Jens’ bibliography has some 132 publications
with 11 more noted as being in press. In Journal of Crustacean Biology alone, Jens is a main author on at least 10
publications and he was awarded the “Best Paper Prize” for
[email protected]
© The Crustacean Society, 2014. Published by Brill NV, Leiden
DOI:10.1163/1937240X-00002222
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JOURNAL OF CRUSTACEAN BIOLOGY, VOL. 34, NO. 2, 2014
1990 (see JCB 12(1): 67). Some of the most notable items
on this list are those constituting his “Doctor of Science”
thesis from 1996 (equivalent to the German “Habilitation”),
counting a total of 28 major papers on many different aspects and details of the life cycle of the Rhizocephala. He
has published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals,
such as BMC Biology, PLoS One, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Marine Biology, Journal of Morphology, Zoomorphology, Biofouling and Nature. The very
broad impact of his research is also reflected in the fact that
his drawings and figures of Rhizocephalan life cycles, e.g.,
that for Lernaeodiscus procellanae, is very widely used in
standard textbooks such as Brusca and Brusca; Ruppert, Fox,
and Barnes; Westheide and Rieger; and so on.
Jens served as the 10th President of The Crustacean
Society from 2000-2002, and has been actively taking part
in the debates of the Board for many years. In Jens, the
Society has always had a strong proponent for the inclusion
of students and young, non-tenured scientists in the ranks.
Jens has also been among the strongest promoters of a
truly International Society always reminding the “state side”
members of the strengths of including the rest of the world
into the Society.
In conclusion, Prof. Jens T. Høeg’s career so far has most
certainly been one of excellence, and we are all convinced
that it will continue so, also in the future.
R ESPONSE OF J ENS T. H ØEG
Dear friends of TCS, I want to thank you all, and the society
in particular. This is because at two highly crucial moments
in my career, once very early on and once much later, TCS
was pivotal in both launching my career and in assuring me
that I was on the right track.
Some 15 years back, at the ICC-4 meeting in Amsterdam
in 1998, Geoff Boxshall was similarly awarded by our
society and said something I shall never forget. He and I
are not too different in age, and Geoff remarked that in his
time he really did not get that much direct support during
his early career as a student. He even was not very carefully
supervised, but to him that was not the key thing. The reason
he, like myself, looks back with joy on those days is that
we were both provided one very precious thing: we were
given an opportunity. Nothing really, except ourselves, set
the limits for what we could or were allowed to do!
Now, my first precious opportunity occurred in 1978.
At that time, wonderfully supported by my Danish mentor
Jørgen Lützen, I had battled for about a year to crack the
rhizocephalan life cycle. I had collected them in Scandinavia
and kept them alive on their hosts – not so easy I can tell you.
I had collected the larvae and raised them to cyprids. That
was even less easy. Yes, they are lecithotrophic and need no
feeding. However, a large rhizo larva is only 250 μm, so they
disappear virtually before your eyes. And those you see are
the majority fraction that stick to the air/water interface and
are essentially out of circulation. So, having raised scores of
broods, I never saw a single one settle and metamorphose.
This was not so good for being able to use TEM to unravel
the totally unknown host infection process, which was my
project.
By serendipitous happenstance, a good colleague and
friend was with me at a field laboratory in Sweden, Prof.
Nick Holland of Scripps Institution. Nick knew that his
colleague Prof. Bill Newman, who is with us here in Austin,
Texas today, had had a student, Larry Ritchie – sadly
deceased – who had stumbled onto what is now almost a
“model rhizocephalan.” So, said Nick, “Come to California
and do the job. You can live for free with us for as long as
you wish, no kidding!” I got a small grant, flew (for only the
third time in my life) to far away La Jolla, California, and
into the lab of Bill Newman, who generously made all the
information he had available to me. The research worked.
Lady Luck was there in the lab, and Bill said, “Before you
do your own TEM work, why don’t you publish the key parts
of Ritchie’s results?” And so it happened that already in the
first volume of JCB, I had my first, and I believe I can say
best-selling paper (Ritchie and Høeg, 1981). That was even
before I submitted my master’s thesis and got any degree –
thanks to TCS.
Back to Denmark I came, having crucially experienced
what is an American research environment and approach,
and did my Ph.D. After that, and three years of postdoc
money, I had essentially exhausted the funding options
afforded by the Danish Carlsberg Foundation. You may not
know and appreciate this, but each and every time you drink
a Carlsberg, the money does not go to some billionaire or
to some shareholders; all profits go to two foundations, one
for the Arts and one for the Sciences – the legacy of “old”
brewer J. C. Jacobsen and his son, Carl.
I wrote an application to our governmental Science Foundation and also got a big NO! Not good I tell you. I had
newly purchased a house, had a one-year old daughter, and
a wife up to her ears in debt over having just purchased
a dental practice. Panic! José Bresciani, a good friend and
copepodologist at the Royal Danish Agricultural Polytechnic helped by introducing me to a group working with parasitic nematodes. They could use my electron microscope
and expertise. And surely, are not nematodes exciting? But
then, lo and behold, just before I was to commit to nematology, I received a letter from two prominent TCS members,
Jody Martin and Ray Bauer, who remain to this day some of
my best friends in science. These eminent scientists invited
me to the yearly TCS/ASZ meeting in San Francisco to talk
on rhizocephalan sexual biology. Not parasitism per se mind
you, but sexual biology, which was exactly the route I had
planned to enter into with the failed grant applications. They
would pay air fare and hotel, and feature me in a full invited
speaker slot. So, I wrote a new application to the Carlsberg
Foundation, implying between the lines that while I might
be low down on their list of priorities did they really want
me to quit crustaceans now!? I asked for just one more year
of extraordinary funding.
I went to San Francisco to what was a fantastic meeting
for me. This was not only carcinology, but the full panoply
of zoological science. I did what every first time meeting
attendant will do: every morning I made a flow chart of
which talks to go to and when. In the evening I rehearsed
again and again my own presentation, using picked-up tips
and tricks I gathered from the previous day’s talks, readying
myself for “battle time” which was virtually the last talk on
JENS THORVALD HØEG, RECIPIENT OF THE CRUSTACEAN SOCIETY EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AWARD
the last day. There was one beautiful young woman there,
not in the Crustacean Sexual Biology meeting but some days
before in a molecular phylogeny session. She gave the most
exciting talk on crab phylogeny and generously gave me
advice on how to shape my own presentation. I guess some
of you may know her, Trisha Spears, from the lab of Larry
Abele.
Ray Bauer, Jody Martin, and my paper in their TCS 1988
symposium (Høeg, 1991) gave me so much confidence that
immediately after coming home I declined what was actually
a permanent position in a parasitology institution, which
would have meant little or no research. I resolved to continue
with work on Crustacea. It was still another gruelling seven
years of not knowing the future before finally getting tenure.
So my turning points were Bill Newman, a founding
patron of TCS, and Ray Bauer and Jody Martin, whose
support meant more to me than I can ever impress on them.
And, all the young researchers out there, this is important
to me to impress on you. Attending a small meeting can
be both cosy and rewarding, but the opportunities and
inspiration offered by a broad-scale biological meeting,
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where organismal biology has a prominent place, cannot be
denied. To me, my contacts with The Crustacean Society
were instrumental in convincing me to carry on with my
research, and this is why I am particularly happy to receive
The Crustacean Society Excellence in Research Award here
today at a TCS/SICB event in Austin, Texas. For large and
tumultuous as they may be, I remain convinced that these
societies and gatherings are crucial to the survival and wellbeing of our science.
Thank you all.
R EFERENCES
Høeg, J. T. 1990. “Akentrogonid” host invasion and an entirely new type of
life cycle in the rhizocephalan parasite Clistosaccus paguri (Thecostraca:
Cirripedia). Journal of Crustacean Biology 10: 37-52.
. 1991. Functional and evoluionary aspects of the sexual system in
the Rizocephala (Thecostraca: Cirripedia), pp. 208-227. In, R. T. Bauer
and J. W. Martin (eds.), Crustacean Sexual Biology. Columbia University
Press, New York, NY.
Ritchie, L. E., and J. T. Høeg. 1981. The life history of Lernaeodiscus porcellanae (Cirripedia: Rhizocephala) and co-evolution with its porcellanid
host. Journal of Crustacean Biology 1: 334-347.