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 ∗ E-mail: 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 290 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, 291 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.
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