Eugene and Howard Odum: The two brothers are known as the leading figures in the development of ecosystem ecology post world war 2. I chose to write about them due to their significant contributions in the field of ecology. They were from a prominent academic family, with their father being a sociologist. With their contrasting personalities and perspectives on research, they came up with many ideas together about the central concept of ecology and environmental science. In the early 1950s, they conducted an important study of ecosystem function on Eniwetok Atoll, the site of US nuclear weapons testing. All their studies were supported by the US atomic energy commission. Theri work highited coral reef ecosystems as highly integrated and cooperative assemblage of organisms. The resulting publication was awarded the Mercer Prize from the Ecological Society of America in 1956. Three years later, the second edition of Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology was published. This was an expanded edition that included important new chapters on ecosystem energetics and biogeochemical cycling. After this, the Odums had independen careers.
The symbiotic relationship between the Odum brothers was recognized later in their careers when they were jointly awarded the Prix de l’Institut de la Vie in 1975 by the French government and the 1987 Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Eugene entered, University of North Carolina when he was only fifteen years old. He continued his extracurricular ornithological studies, sometimes at the expense of his coursework, which resulted in several publications before he graduated. Lackluster grades nearly derailed his application for graduate studies in the Zoology Department at the University of Illinois, but the ecologist Charles Kendeigh intervened to get him accepted into the program. Under Kendeigh’s direction, Odum completed a dissertation on the heart rate of nesting birds. Eugene spent almost his entire professional career at the University of Georgia where he was hired as the first ecologist in the Zoology Department in 1940. He continued his ornithological studies, particularly on the physiology of migrating birds. However, his interests expanded to research on ecosystems after the Second World War. Intellectually, the shift toward ecosystem studies encouraged a multidisciplinary approach to ecology that fit uncomfortably within the institutional setting of a zoology department. An enduring legacy of Eugene Odum’s tenure at the University of Georgia was his successful creation of an autonomous Institute of Ecology, which became a major center of education and research after it was finally established in 1967. Odum also served as president of the Ecological Society of America in 1964.
As a boy, Howard Thomas Odum (usually referred to as H.T.) had a keen boyhood interest in electronics, which later found expression through his professional interests in using analog computers to model ecosystem functions. He also shared his older brother’s interest in ornithology and published two articles on bird migration when he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina. H.T.’s undergraduate studies were interrupted by three years of military service during the Second World War. He gained professional recognition for his work predicting hurricanes as a meteorologist with the United States Army Air Corps, and he later claimed that this experience stimulated his interest in large, complex systems. After the war, H.T. completed a Ph.D. at Yale under the direction of G. Evelyn Hutchinson. His dissertation on the global biogeochemical cycle of strontium continues to be influential. Unlike his older brother whose professional work was closely identified with a single university, H.T. pursued a peripatetic career. He taught biology at the University of Florida for four years. He later held a succession of academic positions at Duke University, University of Texas, University of Puerto Rico, and University of North Carolina, before returning to the University of Florida for the final thirty-two years of his long career
Barrett, Gary W. 2005. Eugene Pleasants Odum. In Biographical memoirs 87. By Gary W. Barrett, 1–16. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences Press.
Ewel, John J. 2003. Resolution of respect: Howard Thomas Odum (1924–2002). Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 84:13–15
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 