Much More Than Just a Fleeting Interest

Naomi Pierce can't explain why she loves butterflies, but she does.

And it's more than just a fleeting interest.

Her passion for the little winged creatures took her to Yale, Harvard, Oxford and Princeton. And now, the 35-year-old biologist has returned to Cambridge, not only as Harvard's first-ever Hessell Professor of Biology, but also as the Museum of Comparative Biology's curator of Lepidoptera.

That's butterflies to you and me.

"She was turned off by the roaches in my biology of insects course," says Dr. Charles Remington, a Yale biology professor and curator of entymology at the Peabody museum there. "But she fell in love with butterflies."

Pierce has built her career upon observing, studying and theorizing about the winged insects. More specifically, she has spent most of her time studying the mutualism between butterfly and ant species. In her work, she has come across an unusual relationship whereby ants protect caterpillars from predators and the caterpillars secrete protein-rich food for the ants.

And just as Pierce studies the mutual relationship between insects, she herself engages in a mutual relationship with other entymological disciplines. Colleagues say Pierce has a unique talent for tackling the tough questions about butterflies by drawing on approaches from fields other than her own.

"What is particularly unusal about Naomi is her ability to attack the same subject from many different points of view," says Norm Carlin, who studied with Pierce in the Biology Department at exocrine biology--she's remarkably well-versed in a number of different areas."

number of different areas."

"She has such skills in asking intriguing questions where it is necessary to have collaborations in fields different from her own," Remington says. "She's been able to produce fusions of knowledge due to her working so effectively with people in other fields," he says.

As an example, in tracing the origin of communication between caterpillars and ants, Pierce has worked with both molecular biologists and biochemists.

Enter Ant Man

Early on, Pierce's penchant for interdisciplinary studies took her beyond the world of butterflies into the world of ants--with none other than Harvard's Baird Professor of Science E.O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning entymologist known affectionately as the "ant man."

Pierce actually studied under Wilson when she was working towards her Ph.D. at Harvard. But the ant man is not Pierce's number one mentor. That distinction belongs to Remington, whose inspiring lecture on butterflies convinced Pierce to stop by his offices while she was an undergraduate.

"I told him that I was curious about butterflies," Pierce recalls. "He got a big smile on his face and ushered me right in."

Soon after, Pierce was spending the summer at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colo.

And after graduating from Yale in '76, she was off to Japan and Australia to study "butterflies and their host plants north and south of the equator."

"Since then, I've never looked back," Pierce says.

Indeed, beginning with her first trip there, Pierce has developed an affinity for Australia, where she now spends three months of every year, living in cabins in the bush.

Now at Harvard, Pierce will spend one year exclusively doing research, and will begin teaching next fall. Pierce says she has been working with students ever since leaving college, serving as a teaching fellow in "just about every bio class at Harvard."

Meanwhile, the scholar looks forward to conducting research in the new laboratories on the top floor of the Museum of Comparative Zoology labs. There will be separate facilities for ants and for butterflies, complete with a common area where they can mingle.

And that's where you'll find Naomi Pierce.

A talent for tackling the tough questions about butterflies