John A. King

John Arthur ("Jack") King (born June 22, 1921 in Detroit , Michigan - † September 22, 2014 in Upper Peninsula , Michigan), known as John A. King , was an American mammal logist and behavioral biologist . He researched the interactions of genetic makeup and environmental factors on the behavior of mammals ; He was particularly interested in how the behavior of adult animals is influenced by experiences they had when they were young. From 1961 to 1986 King was Professor of Zoology at Michigan State University .

Life

Jack King was the son of Royal E. King and his wife Marie King née Neuport and grew up in Detroit. Even as a schoolboy he was fascinated by the different behaviors of domestic and wild animals, so that he joined the American Society of Mammalogists in 1939, at the age of 18 - the same year that he studied zoology at the University of Michigan enrolled. In February 1943 he obtained a bachelor's degree, two months later he was drafted into the United States Army Air Forces for military service and trained as a B-17 pilot, but was able to return to civilian life in autumn 1945. In the months that followed, he financed himself through casual work and traveled through North and South America and Europe.

In early 1947 he continued his studies at the University of Michigan and soon became a research assistant to the ecologist and geneticist Lee R. Dice , a student of Joseph Grinnell . For his doctoral thesis , he analyzed the social organization and population dynamics of the black-tailed prairie dogs in Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota from the summer of 1948 . In an autobiographical review of his studies in 1985, King wrote that his "classic" field study on prairie dogs had pushed his scientific career forward and was only supplemented by a new long-term study in the 1970s. His findings also include the fact that black-tailed prairie dogs - a rodent - influence the vegetation of their biotope . They keep the vegetation short and in this way can perceive possible predators from a great distance, which is indicated by alarm calls. In addition, digging their underground places of refuge leads to a loosening of the earth's surface so that the seeds of potentially nutritious grasses can germinate more easily.

After successful promotion in the summer of 1951 he received a postdoctoral - Scholarship for the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor ( Maine ) at John Paul Scott , after its expiry, he was awarded a permanent position in the Jackson Laboratory, where he remained until 1960th In Bar Harbor, he researched the social behavior of house mice , especially the C57BL / 10 line. Among his projects, for example, belonged to clarify the question of how hormones , the agonistic behavior influence, but also topics from the field of developmental biology . After a short time he gave up observing the behavior of the domestic dogs kept in the Jackson Laboratory because of the considerable time required. From 1956 he turned increasingly to the research of white-footed mice of the genus Peromyscus - his most important research object in the following 30 years. In behavioral observations and experiments, he devoted himself to the systematics and ecology of the white-footed mice, he compared the behavior of different species of this genus with each other and with house mice, the changes in the course of the transition from childhood and adolescence to the adult animal and, based on his observations, contributed a. a. helps to reconstruct the tribal history of the genus.

After King received a one-year scholarship for a stay abroad in 1959, he first spent six months in Edinburgh with Conrad Hal Waddington and then the rest of the time in Germany with Bernhard Rensch in Münster . During this time he received an offer to return to Michigan State University. Initially as an Associate Professor of Zoology, from 1965 as a Full Professor, he stayed there until his retirement in 1986.

In retirement, Jack King first moved to a farm in Webberville (Michigan) , and from 2007 he lived on Lake Michigan in Rapid River (Michigan) ( Delta County ). He was born in June 1949 with Joan. McGinty married, the couple had two children. Joan King was a lecturer at the Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University and, from 1999, Acting Regional Vice President of the American Association of Retired Persons .

King was a founding member in 1964 and President of the Animal Behavior Society in 1970/71, as well as a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Fonts (selection)

• Social behavior, social organization, and population dynamics in a black-tailed prairie-dog town in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In: Contributions from the Laboratory of Vertebrate Biology. No. 67, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1955.
• Parameters relevant to determining the effects of early experience upon the adult behavior of animals. In: Psychological Bulletin. Volume 55, No. 1, 1958, pp. 46-58., Doi: 10.1037 / h0041002 .
• as editor: Biology of Peromyscus (Rodentia). The American Society of Mammalogists, Special Publication, No. 2, 1968, full text
• A comparison of longitudinal and cross-sectional groups in the development of behavior in deermice. In: Annals of the New York Academy of Science. Vol. 159, No. 3, 1969, pp. 696-709, doi: 10.1111 / j.1749-6632.1969.tb12972.x .
• Light reinforcement in four taxa of deer mice (Peromyscus). In: Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. Volume 71, No. 1, 1970, pp. 22-28, doi: 10.1037 / h0028967 .
• The ecology of aggressive behavior. In: Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. Volume 4, 1973, pp. 117-138, doi: 10.1146 / annurev.es.04.110173.001001 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John A. King Papers on the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections server , accessed May 26, 2020.
2. ^ Lee C. Drickamer: John A. King: 1921-2014. In: Journal of Mammalogy. Volume 96, No. 4, 2015, pp. 884-889, doi: 10.1093 / jmammal / gyv088 .
3. ^ John A. King: Those Critical Periods of Social Reinforcement. In: Donald A. Dewsbury: Studying Animal Behavior. Autobiographies of the Founders. Chicago University Press, Chicago and London 1985, ISBN 978-0-226-14410-8 , pp. 204-223, here: p. 206.