The (Mis)measure of a Man: Martin “Jack” J. Fouquette, Jr., 1930–2014

H OW does one measure the accomplishments of a scientist? Number of publications? Number of citations to those publications? Perhaps number of grants obtained over a lifetime of NSF applications, revisions, and resubmittals—pleadings with program officers and budgetary cutbacks notwithstanding? Some university presidents have, of late, increasingly called for a ‘‘business model approach’’ in which total ‘‘grant dollars’’ is the primary metric. A push toward a relatively objective quantifiable means of evaluating academic scientists is entirely understandable, but these tools have a number of limitations. Close to home, impact factor measures have not been kind to herpetologists; inexplicably, Copeia scores , 1.0. If one publishes primarily in ‘‘herp’’ journals, rather than, for example, biomedical or microbiology outlets, the widely used ‘‘H’’ index derived by citation indices, is comparatively low. Though quantifiable metrics such as these are widely used in academic circles during promotion and tenure assessments, I echo the concerns that have been raised by many—even non-herpetologists. I begin this contribution by noting that the H index for Jack Fouquette was a mere 4 when I checked in August, 2014, after he passed. Are these meaningful measures by which to judge a long-established journal or man? I think not. MARTIN JOHN FOUQUETTE, JR., was born 14 June 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but lived there only two years before his family moved to Huntington, West Virginia. Five years later he and his family came west, settling in Kerrville (Fig. 1), Texas, rather than California, like so many other Depression era migrants from the eastern United States. His formative years in central Texas imbued Jack with a love for westerns such as ‘‘Have Gun, Will Travel’’. His early days in Texas also led him to enroll at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, due to geographic proximity. As a youngster, Jack loved snakes, but his parents worried about the meager employment prospects for herpetologists, and consequently, in line with their wishes, he initially selected chemistry as a major at UT. Nonetheless, it wasn’t long after his arrival at UT that he was exposed to Frank Blair and his large lab group, which subsequently influenced him to change his major ‘‘back’’ to zoology. He finished his BA, and pursued a Masters under Frank Blair, focusing on gartersnakes, his first love (Fouquette, 1954). Frank urged Jack to take up anurans as subjects for his dissertation; decades later, Jack championed the utility of anurans for scientific study while mentoring his own students, myself included, at Arizona State University (ASU). After completing his M.A. under Blair, Jack had a critical decision on his hands, like so many young men at a time of war, or in this case, a ‘‘police action’’ posing as a war. He decided to join the USAF to avoid serving in the infantry in Korea even though it entailed four years of service instead of two. He consulted Blair; Frank suggested Jack purchase a tape recorder, which he could use on his free days to record frog calls. As a result of Blair’s urgings, Jack requested that he be assigned to Panama, where he would serve as a navigator on a seaplane, a Grumman S-16, in the air rescue branch of the Air Force, in part because he imagined it would afford ample research opportunities. Jack bought the requisite recording equipment before he departed so he could gather data on calling in various hylid frogs in Central America (e.g., Fouquette, 1960). The judicious advice of Blair allowed Jack to finish his Ph.D. at UT Austin (1959), just two years after his release from the Air Force in 1957. At a time when (apparently) major professors like Frank Blair could provide adequate direction in a few short sentences, it was an amazing testimonial to Jack’s ability to work independently, something he instilled in his students at ASU. It is difficult to overstate the influence of Frank Blair and his graduate students on the field of bioacoustics, especially with anuran amphibians. Jack never tired of talking about Blair’s first paper describing the use of the Kay Sona-Graph in the analysis of anuran advertisement calls as it was based on recordings made right in his (future) ‘‘backyard’’ in central Arizona, just north of ASU (Blair and Pettus, 1954). Ironically, Blair argued that the advertisement calls of Bufo alvarius, the subject of the analysis, possessed ‘‘vestigial’’ calls, no longer functional. Jack was especially pleased when two of his students, the present author and Keith Malmos, a Ph.D. student we coadvised, were able to demonstrate otherwise in the early 1990s (Sullivan and Malmos, 1994). Blair was the major advisor of dozens of graduate students from the late fifties to the late seventies, virtually all of whom worked on some aspect of call variation in relation to species boundaries in North American bufonids, hylids, or ranids. Jack was a part of that vibrant group in the 1950s, when the arrival of Murray Littlejohn (from Australia) as a post-doc in 1958–1959 coincided with experimental demonstrations of female phonotaxis in discrimination trials, a truly significant breakthrough in behavioral systematic studies (Blair, 1955; Littlejohn and Michaud, 1959). Jack commented more than once that he was proud to know and work with Murray (e.g., Fouquette and Littlejohn, 1960), one of the ‘‘champions’’ of character displacement, a phenomenon that both he and Murray Littlejohn were renowned for having documented empirically, a feat shared by only a handful of evolutionary biologists despite the efforts of hundreds. Living in Austin during the 1950s, Jack shared a house with Ralph Axtell, a long-lived herpetologist with fond memories of Jack’s tales of bushmasters in car trunks, vague and incomplete explanations of how he had captured the snake, much less how he ‘‘free handled’’ it to the back of the car on a dark, rainy night in Panama. Those early years in Austin were productive for Blair and his students (e.g., Fouquette and Lindsay, 1955; Fouquette and Potter, 1961); Jack never forgot the kindness of his major professor, and of his wife, Fern Blair. Years later, when I arrived in Austin as a post-doc under Mike Ryan (Frank Blair’s replacement), I was happy to have access to Blair’s massive reprint