Doyle B. McKey '71

Doyle McKey, a 1971 graduate of Texas A&M University (B.S. in Wildlife Science), has been awarded the French Ecological Society’s Grand Prize for Research for 2014. The French Ecological Society is France’s national professional society for academic researchers in ecology. The Grand Prize for Research is awarded once each year to honor an ecologist for the overall body of work during his or her career and for dedication to the broad field of ecology. The prize was announced at the Society’s annual meeting in Lille, France, in December 2014, and the prize ceremony, during which McKey will deliver a lecture about his current research, will take place February 6 in Paris. 

McKey, son of Helen McKey and the late John C. McKey of Edna, first began research in tropical ecology more than 40 years ago. Several professors at A&M were important sources of inspiration, among them Keith Arnold (now Emeritus) and the late Richard Baldauf in Wildlife Science, and Gordon Frankie (now at UC Berkeley) and Joseph Schaffner (now Emeritus) in Entomology. Since 1995 he has been a professor at the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Montpellier in southern France, where he has taught generations of students and trained a large number of Master and PhD students as well as several post-doctoral associates, many of whom now hold permanent academic positions.

After graduating from Texas A&M University, he went on to pursue doctoral studies with the well-known tropical ecologist Daniel Janzen at the University of Chicago (1971-1972) and then at the University of Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in 1979. His dissertation research involved a several-years-long comparative field study of chemical defenses of plants against herbivores in two African rainforests (in Cameroon and Uganda) and the impact of these defenses on food selection by a mammal that feeds on leaves and seeds of a large diversity of plant species, the black colobus monkey.

After completing his Ph.D., McKey returned to Cameroon for a year-and-a-half of post-doctoral research in tropical rain forest ecology. In 1981 he took a four-year assistant professor position at the University of Basel, Switzerland. From Basel he moved to the University of Miami, where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Biology from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he was offered a full professor position at the University of Montpellier, where he has worked ever since.

McKey has done field work in many countries in tropical Africa, Asia and South America, on a great diversity of themes in tropical ecology. These include the ecology of symbiotic interactions between ants and plants—interactions in which specialized plants provide food and nesting sites to equally specialized ants that live only on these plants, and provide their host plant with protection against plant-eating insects and other enemies. He has also investigated the changes that occurred in tropical root crops such as cassava as their wild ancestors were domesticated by humans, changes that continue under traditional management of these crops by small farmers in the tropics.

For the past six years, he has directed a project on the ecology of seasonally flooded savannas in Africa and South America. This project focuses on how various soil organisms escape seasonal flooding by building mounds to gain access to well-drained soils, in the process creating habitats for many other organisms. Mound-builders include humans, who make (or made in the past) “raised fields” to grow crops intolerant of flooding. This project has required collaboration with researchers from many disciplines, including ecology, soil science, agronomy, archaeology, anthropology, geography and remote sensing. The project has taken McKey to four countries in South America (French Guiana, Colombia, Bolivia and Uruguay) and two countries in Africa (Congo and Zambia). The project has attracted interest not only for its contribution to fundamental research in ecology but also for its potential applications in environmentally friendly agriculture. Raised-field farming in these habitats has attracted some attention as a way in which agriculture could work with wetlands and their biodiversity, rather than against them.

McKey lives near Montpellier with his wife, Martine Hossaert-McKey, also an ecologist and Deputy Director of the Institute of Ecology and Environment of the CNRS, France’s National Center for Scientific Research. Their daughter, Jennifer McKey, obtained her Ph.D. in developmental biology at the University of Montpellier in December 2014 and is currently working as an assistant professor there.

McKey continues to develop the project on seasonally flooded savannas. A current focus of his research involves how humans who construct agricultural raised fields interact with earthworms, termites and other non-human mound-building “soil engineers” in these environments. His team has found that present-day farmers in Zambia integrate termite mounds into their agricultural raised fields, creating structures that are neither purely natural nor purely man-made. (His team has found that pre-Columbian farmers in Bolivia did the same thing.) This kind of cooperation between humans and nature may provide clues on how to farm in ways that conserve natural diversity and its contributions to human well-being.

Link to the official announcement:
http://www.sfecologie.org/prix-2/