Author of “Serendipity” to Speak at the Darling Marine Cente

Dr. Jim Estes, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a member of the esteemed National Academy of Science, will present a “brown-bag” seminar at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center (DMC) in Walpole on Thursday, September 8th at 12noon.

The talk is titled: Adventures in nature and the pathways to ecological understanding and will feature excerpts from Estes’ new book “Serendipity” which was published earlier this year.

When Estes began graduate school in the late 1960s, the world of ecology was dominated by four broadly held beliefs or common assumptions: all species are equally important, competition runs the world, production and bottom-up forcing rule, and all good science is hypothesis driven.

His life as an ecologist, guided to a significant degree by serendipitous events, led Estes to embrace differing views of the relative importance of species, the nature of key ecological processes, and the way in which discovery and understanding really happen.

This lunchtime lecture will recount some of the details—from a failed draft physical in 1970 which set him down a path toward working in marine systems, to revelations from fortuitous meetings with various people along the way, to the development of a world view that initially was driven more by escape than curiosity—the pathway to ecological understanding has been a great adventure.

Estes will be at the Darling Marine Center working with Dr. Bob Steneck and Dr. Doug Rasher on their ocean acidification project conducted in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

The DMC is located at 193 Clarks Cove Road in Walpole and the talk will take place in Brooke Hall on the lower waterfront campus. Please bring your own brown bag lunch. For directions or more information about the DMC please visit our website dmc.umaine.edu.