Passings Ronald Overdahl passed away on July 31, 2019, at age 74. Ronald graduated from UWM in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree, majoring in Political Science. He taught photography at UWM and was a news photographer with the Milwaukee Journal from 1967-2001. Overdahl was inducted into the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio for a 1972 photo of the Green Bay Packers in action. Ronald’s full obituary can be viewed at https://bit.ly/2M3u6mM.
UWM Photo by Troye Fox
Spiders weave a web of memories Arachnophobes might want to skip this story. Because spiders might be more intelligent than you think. To compensate for not seeing very well, spiders usually manage their world by detecting vibrations in their webs. They even strike a specific pose to do it, spreading their two front legs apart and remaining still. But Rafael Rodríguez Sevilla, an associate professor of biological sciences who researches the cognitive abilities of miniature brains, has evidence that black widow spiders make mental maps of their webs. And about 50 percent of the time, they rely on memory before vibrations. “We’re trying to describe components of active consciousness,” he says. “Are they aware of their memories with such a small brain? We think the answer is yes.” In one experiment, Rodríguez Sevilla and his lab members swapped the current webs of hungry spiders with older webs containing no food. Half of the spiders conducted a fruitless search for up to a full minute when confronted with their new location. So single-minded was their persistence that not even live prey inserted elsewhere on the web distracted them. “They are attending to the mismatch between their environment and their memory,” Rodríguez Sevilla says. “You can see the same behavior in humans. That confusion is a sign of higher intelligence.” The researchers tested for memory of the web’s contents across several spider families. They found that not only did the spiders remember they caught something, but they also remembered features of the prey and the quantity of it. Memory in tiny creatures was long thought to be a hardwired behavior that didn’t require much mental capacity. “Our results,” Rodríguez Sevilla says, “suggest that the ability to make mental maps is a common feature of animal brains, even relatively small and simple ones.”
Gregory Mursky, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences, passed away on August 23, 2019, at age 90. Dr. Mursky was a professor in the department of geosciences who began teaching at UWM in the fall of 1964. His career at UWM spanned over three decades before he retired in 1997. During that time, he taught thousands of undergraduate and many graduate students in geological subjects dealing with mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, and the geology of the planets and our moon. While at UWM, he also served as Chair of the Geology Department (as it was known at the time), and played a key role in the development of the Department, including hiring and staffing the faculty. Dr. Mursky had an impressive list of publications dealing with his research and several textbooks for college geology students. He had a keen interest in the Ukrainian Academic and Cultural Societies, and was instrumental in the introduction of Ukrainian courses at UWM. Dr. Mursky’s obituary is online at https://bit.ly/2Zrwg6M.
By Laura Otto, University Relations College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 9
