Retiring Faculty The Inner/Outer Game of Plants

Left to right: Mayra Ninazunta, Dale Forrister, Yamara de Lourdes Serrano Añazco, Lissy Coley, Tom Kursar

ECOLOGIST LISSY COLEY

“I first stepped foot in a tropical rainforest in 1975 and have been back every year doing research on how plants defend themselves against getting eaten by insects,” says Phyllis “Lissy” Coley who retired this year from the School of Biological Sciences. The pandemic has prevented her from heading south this time around, but in fact the rainforest has been a second home. With the late Tom Kursar, her partner-in-life and in work, they blended her training in ecology and his in biophysics to work in multiple countries in both the African Congo and the Amazon as well as in Panama, Borneo and Malaysia.

“Our work has focused on why the tropics are so diverse,” she continues. “How can 650 tree species--more than in all of North America--live together in a single hectare of tropical forest?” Another question related to the first includes what drives speciation. “We have shown that the arms race with insect herbivores leads to extraordinarily rapid evolution of a battery of plant defenses, particularly chemical toxins, such that a given species of herbivore has evolved counter adaptations that allow it to feed on only plant species with similar defenses.”

It turns out that plant species with different defenses do not share herbivores and therefore can co-exist, promoting high local diversity. The concept that the high biodiversity of tropical forests is due to these antagonistic interactions is now widely accepted.

To know Tom and Lissy is to know that their research is and has been highly personal. And their ambitions would naturally extend to beyond field research to economic opportunity for their friends and associates in Central America, linking even to social justice. Their concern about forest destruction and the peoples who live in those sites has led to bioprospecting. “We used our curiosity-driven (basic) research to create ways to have benefits from intact forests via drug discovery.” Young, expanding tropical leaves invest fifty percent of their dry weight in hundreds of chemicals. “We thought they could be an undiscovered source of pharmaceutical medicines.”

The duo set the project up in Panama, with the majority of the work being done by local scientists. It has resulted in fifteen million dollars of seed money to Panama. Their discoveries have led to promising patents, research experiences for hundreds of students and the creation of more jobs than the country’s ubiquitous and potentially destructive logging. Furthermore the project has established the island of Coiba as a protected World Heritage Site and created a new voice of Panamanian scientists helping to shape government policy and appreciation of their natural treasures.

While Coley has retired from teaching, her lab and its research continues at the School. “I think one of the unifying principles that made our department interesting to me,” she concludes, “is that many faculty were interested at some level in evolution.” The late K. Gordon Lark, department chair in the 70s, was the impetus for that. “Whether we’re talking about molecular or ecological systems, evolutionary/ecological interactions shape all of that. This has been an important unifier of research interest in the School.” Along with recent hires of outstanding young faculty researchers, which she hopes will continue, this “unifier” has helped keep such a large academic unit intact. “It has been sort of the glue.”

As Tom and Lissy have always cared deeply about graduate students, the Coley/Kursar Endowment was established in 2018 to fund graduate student field research in Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology. You can make a donation or set up a planned-giving vehicle to further this important work in the School of Biological Sciences at www.biology.utah.edu/ CrimsonLaureate.php