Turlings, Ted

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COMMENTARY: REFLECTIONS ON 40 YEARSFrom Applied Entomology to Evolutionary Ecology and BackTed C. J. TurlingsPublished online: 12 March 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014“He is lost for science.” Those were the words from a highly respectedevolutionary ecologist when he learned, almost 30 years ago, that I wouldtravel to the US to conduct a PhD project in chemical ecology at the USDA inGainesville, Florida. Agro-ecosystems were commonly avoided like theplague by respected or respectable ecologists. An obsession with the F-wordcan be blamed for this. The general perception has long been that fundamentalresearch is far more worthy than applied research, and that this can only beconducted in “natural” systems. This seems a bit silly if we consider that morethan 50 % of the terrestrial surface of our planet is being exploited andmodified in some way or another by humans (http://data.worldbank.org),and it is time to accept that most of the relevant contemporary evolution istaking place in these exploited areas.We also can wonder if it really is so bad to devote our research efforts to“unnatural” systems in order to address questions of importance to our society.Even the respected ecologist that criticized my career move eventually sold outand switched to applied research, initially most likely because of fundingopportunities, but also perhaps because fundamental research was more andmore considered to be compatible with trendy societal issues like climate change,invasive organisms, and biodiversity. What does this have to do with the Journalof Chemical Ecology and its 40th anniversary? It is my impression that theJournal and the scientists that contribute to it havemade an important trendsettingcontribution to what is considered to be important research. When I left Hollandfor my adventure in Florida, I entered the world of chemical ecology and appliedentomology. I joined the group of JimTumlinson, one of about a dozen scientiststhat have paved the way for the field of chemical ecology and its journal. Theirwork on insect pheromones was groundbreaking and led to the very successfulapplication of pheromones in insect pest control. Much of their work waspublished in the Journal of Chemical Ecology (JCE), but it also led to papersin journals with a slightly higher impact, like Nature and Science. Chemicalecology also was one of the first disciplines that was highly interdisciplinary,combining behavioral ecology, insect physiology, as well as analytical andsynthetic chemistry. This extent of interdisciplinarity was a rarity at the time. Inthose early days, this very young discipline received considerable respect andattracted an important base of enthusiastic young scientists, also those that had abackground in ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that this new infusioncaused a shift in the general focus of research in chemical ecology. It becamemore and more evident that not only pheromones, but also plant-derivedchemicals are of utmost importance for the foraging behavior and performanceof insects. Plants and the evolutionary processes that determined their interactionswith insects started to dominate the field. This notion finds support in the types ofpapers that appeared in JCE. Consulting the Web-of-Science teaches us thatindeed pheromone research largely dominated the earlier days of the field. Thenumber of papers on pheromones has not decreased over the years, but othertopics have been introduced (Fig. 1). One of those is evolutionary ecology. Theterm evolution rarely occurred in earlier work, but, as Fig. 2 shows us, was animportant aspect of much of the work that was published in JCE in the nineties,and it is still going strong. It seems roughly correct to say that most of thisevolutionary work was inspired by a general interest in the evolution of plant-insect interactions. With the involvement of molecular plant physiologists, thework has revealed a tremendously sophisticated network of plant defenseresponses to herbivory and pathogen infections. This knowledge has nowopenedtheway to… application, againwith a great emphasis on controlling insect pests.If you have read this article until here, it probably not only means thatmany of your friends and family regularly tell you to get a life, but also thatyou are probably genuinely interested in the field of chemical ecology. In short,chemical ecologists read the Journal of Chemical Ecology and this is the finalpoint that I would like to make. These days we are playing the numbers gameswith our publications in order to impress our peers, superiors, and fundingagencies. Impact is what counts, and this is not always to the benefit of ourJournal, but it should be. There is a false perception that we are better offpublishing in journals that are a few numbers higher in average impact. If yourintention is to maximize your h-index, this is the wrong notion. I would arguethat your colleagues are more likely to read and cite your papers if they arepublished in JCE than in journals with a considerably higher impact factor. Formyself this is certainly true. I searched for the average number of citations ofthe twenty JCE papers that I have been author on and found that it is 50 %higher than for the average of my papers published in journals that have animpact factor between 3 and 9. I like to think that I was not entirely lost forscience when I decided for a career in chemical ecology. Youwon’t be either,especially if you publish in the Journal of Chemical Ecology.Fig. 1 Pheromones 1977 to 2013Fig. 2 Evolution 1977 to 2013T. C. J. Turlings (*)Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerlande-mail: ted.turlings@unine.chJ Chem Ecol (2014) 40:224DOI 10.1007/s10886-014-0400-x

From Applied Entomology to Evolutionary Ecology and Back

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From Applied Entomology to Evolutionary Ecology and Back

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