“He is famous for describing ring species in a genus known as Ensatina.

He took it to a level and a sophistication that few other people have done.”Īmong the questions Wake addressed were how changes in development give rise to diversity, how geographic variation contributes to the formation of species, and convergent evolution - the way different lineages converge on the same morphological forms and how that happens. But what is unique is how successful Dave was at it. “He is not the only person who chose that strategy. It was molecules to morphology to ecology to behavior to development, overlaid by taxonomy - his was a deliberate conviction that in order to really understand the evolution of organisms, you have to focus on a particular group and get to know it extremely well,” said James Hanken, director of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and one of Wake’s former students. “He chose a particular lineage of organisms - in this case, the family Plethodontidae - and pursued it in all respects in order to understand how the group diversified and why it did the way it did. Nancy Staub, David Wake, Andres Collazo and Chuck Brown digging pitfall traps for Ensatina salamanders in the Sierra Nevada. But to Wake, salamanders were also a means of answering deep questions in evolution. Over his 57-year career, he discovered and described more than 144 new species of salamander and had four amphibian species named after him. His favorite among these were the Ensatina - a West Coast genus he studied, among many others, throughout his career. He focused much of his attention on one species-rich, but poorly understood, family of mostly North and Central American salamanders, the lungless salamanders, Plethodontidae, many of which lead an entirely terrestrial existence and consequently do not lay eggs in water, like many other salamanders. Wake abandoned entomology for the study of amphibians and reptiles, a field known as herpetology. Staub and Mueller are professors and salamander biologists at Gonzaga University and Colorado State University, respectively. He was captivated, and he tried to learn everything he could about these animals,” according to a 2017 perspective on Wake’s life written by former students Nancy Staub and Rachel Lockridge Mueller. “He starting seeing species of Plethodon, and then found Ensatina … and that was it. In search of insects, he’d turn over logs and leaf litter and discover these fascinating creatures. It was while pursuing a college degree in entomology that Wake became fascinated by salamanders. Wake died of organ failure after the reoccurrence of cancer, but until the week he died, his health problems did not keep him from publishing papers, conducting fieldwork, meeting with colleagues in person or on Zoom, and calling friends.

The professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and former director of the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) was 84. Renowned evolutionary biologist David Wake, the world’s leading expert on salamanders and among the first to warn of a precipitous decline in frog, salamander and other amphibian populations worldwide, died peacefully at his home in Oakland, California, on April 29. (Michelle Koo photo courtesy of AmphibiaWeb, 2015) David Wake was an internationally renowned evolutionary biologist who used salamanders to explore deep questions of evolution.

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