Obituary: Kenneth Barclay Armitage (1925—2022)

Dr. Kenneth B. Armitage (Fig. 1), internationally recognized behavioral and physiological ecologist, passed away on 6 January 2022 at his home in Lawrence, Kansas at the age of 96 and surrounded by family. He was a legend in the field of behavioral ecology having executed one of the longest running studies to date, a 40+ year comprehensive study of yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventer) ecology. Ken will be widely remembered for his extensive scholarly contributions and work as a dedicated educator of undergraduates and graduate students throughout his lengthy career. He is survived by his beloved wife, Katie, their children Karole, Keith (Maria), and Kevin, and four granddaughters—Emeline, Julia, Sophie, and Rita. Dr. Kenneth B. Armitage (1925–2022) at the University of Kansas, Lawrence in 1988. Photograph courtesy of University of Kansas Archives. Ken was born 18 April 1925 in Steubenville, Ohio, the only child of Albert Kenneth and Virginia Huntington (nee Barclay) Armitage. His interest in the natural world developed at an early age, and he spent much of his free time watching birds and collecting insects and flowers. He was an active Boy Scout, a YMCA Nature Counselor for several summers, and leader of community bird walks in his hometown. He graduated with honors from Steubenville High School in 1943 and shortly thereafter enlisted in the United States Army (Fig. 2). Ken was assigned to the Army Air Corps for flight training but was transferred to the infantry when the need for flight personnel decreased. He was assigned to the 14th Armored Division and reached Europe in early 1945, in time to participate in the advance of Patton’s Third Army across southern Germany. Following victory in Europe, he was initially slated for the 45th Infantry Division, scheduled to begin training for the invasion of Japan, but at the last minute he was ordered to join a division returning home. In January 1946, he was issued an honorable discharge. A half century later when observing Sand Hill Cranes during the migration along the Nebraska Platte River, he would authoritatively voice “Down landing gear!” every time the cranes came in to land... perhaps a throwback to his time in the military. Kenneth B. Armitage at high school graduation at the age of 18. Photograph courtesy of the Armitage family. Through the support of the G.I. Bill, Ken attended Bethany College, West Virginia from fall 1946 to spring 1949, majoring in biology. He was active on campus forming the Outdoor Club and in leading an effort to integrate the student body, and his activism was recognized by his induction into the campus leadership honor society. Ken graduated summa cum laude and received the Hoagland Award as the outstanding senior graduate. Ken’s academic work was also recognized by his induction into Beta Beta Beta (biological honor society). In the summer of 1949, Ken worked as a Ranger Naturalist at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, a job he did each summer through 1954. Ken’s time in Yellowstone was instrumental in shaping both his career and personal paths. His interests in biology were fueled by the wealth of natural systems in Yellowstone, and he ultimately chose to study the aquatic ecology of the Firehole River for his dissertation research; the Firehole River is unusual in that it is warmed by effluent from Yellowstone’s famous hot springs. It was at Yellowstone where Ken first noticed and was intrigued by marmots, a group which would become the focus of much of his life’s work. Yellowstone was also where, during the summer of 1949, Ken met Katie Lou Hart, then a student from Baylor University. Ken and Katie married in 1953 and enjoyed 68 years of marriage before Ken’s passing. In the fall of 1949, Ken began his pursuit of a doctorate degree at the University of Wisconsin studying limnology under the mentorship of Arthur Hassler, one of the pioneers of limnology. Ken’s research of the Firehole River was supported by an NSF pre-doctoral fellowship and a Knapp House Fellowship, and was published in Ecology. He was inducted into Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society, in 1952. While still a graduate student, Ken recognized his love of teaching, and he taught at the University of Wisconsin Freshmen–Sophomore Centers in Green Bay and Wausau for two years after the completion of his doctorate. Ken joined the Department of Zoology at the University of Kansas in fall 1956 as an aquatic biologist. He earned the rank of full professor in 1966, and was awarded the Baumgartner Distinguished Professor of Systematics and Ecology in 1987. Upon his retirement in 1996, he remained active as a Professor Emeritus in the department. During Ken’s 40-year tenure at KU, he was extremely dedicated to serving not only his students but also many aspects of the institution. Ken believed strongly in the importance of quality education for undergraduate students and to this end, he served as Chair of the Biology Department (for undergraduates) from 1968–1975 and taught undergraduate, introductory biology courses for most of his career at KU. Further, Ken was one of the founders of the undergraduate Environmental Studies Program and served on the Environmental Studies Committee from 1973–1982, serving as Chair from 1976–1982. He went on to serve as Chair of the Department of Systematics and Ecology from 1982–1988. Ken was fully committed to the importance of a rigorous, broad-based general biology course for undergraduates. He believed that introductory biology was critically important to undergraduate education and personally gave the lectures for several years and worked closely with other faculty to develop the course. To accompany the lectures, he and the Director of the laboratories, George Pisani, wrote and published a laboratory manual of topics complementing the lectures and relevant to the times. Their manual, Laboratory Topics in General Biology, was used by several colleges and universities throughout the country (Armitage and Pisani 1991). In recognition of Ken’s commitment to excellence in teaching undergraduate biology, the University of Kansas now recognizes an outstanding teaching assistant with the Kenneth B. Armitage Award for Excellence in Teaching Principles of Biology. Many of Ken’s graduate students were teaching assistants, which afforded them the opportunity to learn directly from their mentor to value and prioritize their teaching efforts. He often attributed his passion for student-centered efforts to his own undergraduate experience at a small liberal arts college. Ken’s competence and skill in the classroom was never more apparent than when he asked two of his graduate students (co-authors here) to cover his introductory biology lectures at a time when he was hospitalized. He assured them that they were up to the task of teaching a large lecture for undergraduates and that it would be simple. “Just follow my notes and the slides are already in the carousel,” Ken said. They agreed, only to quickly realize that his notes were merely cues to what he planned to spontaneously share; notes that were likely very clear to him but extremely challenging to interpret. This experience illustrated Ken’s depth of knowledge and ability to offer a quality course largely from memory. Needless to say, we delivered “adequate” lectures but only after hours of preparation. When Ken began his career at KU, his research focused on aquatic ecology, and he published more than 35 papers on this topic, many with students. In recognition of his research and the discovery of ice-covered warm-water lakes in Antarctic in 1961, he received the Antarctic Medal for Research in Antarctica in 1968. At some point along the way, his research interests shifted to physiological and behavioral ecology questions, and the marmots of Yellowstone that he observed years earlier surfaced as optimal study subjects to address these questions. Ken’s first publications on marmots were based on the Yellowstone population, which required a long hike to access, but he quickly shifted his focus in 1962 to the yellow-bellied marmots of the East River Valley in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL, fondly pronounced “Rumble”). Ken loved to tell the story of how he arrived at RMBL. He claimed that he shifted his work to RMBL due to a conversation he had with Paul Ehrlich who informed him that he should consider work at RMBL as no long hikes were needed to access the marmot colonies but rather he could drive right to them in his car! Ken was certainly not opposed to physical activity but less hiking meant more time for collecting data. Any observant researcher who visited RMBL between 1962 and the early 2000s no doubt saw Ken sitting in his car for hours on end observing marmots through a spotting scope while taking copious notes in a small notebook (Fig. 3). But he was more than a well-known researcher; he was a prominent citizen of the RMBL community. He served 17 years on the RMBL Board of Trustees, including multiple terms on the Executive Council and as Vice President. And he served as President of the Board during the mid-1980s, successfully guiding the lab through a period of major challenges, including the potential encroachment by a nearby ski resort and the transition in lab administration from a part-time director recruited locally to a full-time director recruited nationally. Kenneth B. Armitage in the field, studying yellow-bellied marmot behavior, in the Upper East River Valley, Colorado near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the early 1980s. Photograph courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. During his decades at RMBL, Ken compiled some of the most detailed, long-term behavioral observations of any mammalian species and mentored the work of multiple graduate students collectively known as “The Marmoteers.” Those who worked with Ken each summer at RMBL will likely say that they never worked harder or had more fun at the same time (Fig. 4). Ken worked long hours, was a perfectionist who paid great attention to detail and scientific rigor, and he expected nothing less of his students. Even so, Ken’s passion for his work, his excitement for the work and discoveries of his students, his never-ending sense of humor, and his kindness and understanding in the midst of the vagaries of field research made us all strive to be our best and do our best work. A long-standing joke among The Marmoteers was that Ken, with a wry smile, would often ask any student who was about to head out into the field to trap a marmot in a particularly dangerous location, “Are your field notes up to date?” This was Ken’s playful way to say, be careful out there. When Ken was not in the field observing marmots, he was in the lab talking about the marmots he observed, as if they were members of his family. He could recount each animal’s activities and genealogy as if it was his own. He so identified with marmots that his RMBL cabin was called “The Marmitage.” One of the historical KU mammalogy traditions is that researchers should have eaten their study animal. Once, when asked by a particularly keen graduate student whether he’d ever eaten marmot, Ken jerked back and replied “Why no! That would be cannibalism.” Memories of these moments will forever bring smiles to the hearts of Marmoteers. Kenneth B. Armitage and Alison K. Brody collecting data on yellow-bellied marmots in 1984 in the Upper East River Valley, Colorado near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the early 1980s. Photograph courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Ken continued to conduct research at RMBL until the early 2000s; thus, his research program on marmots spanned four full decades and is renowned as one of the most comprehensive investigations of a mammalian species to date. He authored or co-authored 252 publications in his long career, three-fourths of these centered-on marmot ecology. Many (80!) were published after Ken’s retirement from KU in 1996. His research addressed nearly every aspect of marmot ecology, and he was a pioneer in recognizing the importance of individual fitness in understanding behavior as well as the role of physiological constraints on behavior. It was Ken’s versatility and flexibility that drove him to continue asking and seeking answers to new questions. This kept his work relevant and foundational to our understanding of the behavioral and physiological principles that shape social mammals. In fact, Ken’s work was supported from 1962 to 1995 by continuous funding from the National Science Foundation; a testament to its relevance and import. Ken highlighted his life’s work on marmots in a book entitled, “Marmot Biology: Sociality, Individual Fitness, and Population Dynamics,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 (Armitage 2014). Dedicated to the very end, Ken continued working on manuscripts well into his 96th year and it was only at the age of 95 that Ken announced to his family that he planned to stop updating his curriculum vitae for the Department. While working at RMBL, Ken would host marmot researchers from around the world who came to learn about his study, and later in life, Ken travelled to visit marmot researchers around the world including those in Canada, France, Italy, Switzerland, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Ken delivered over 14 invited, international lectures and he was a sought after expert who provided advice to several marmot conservation projects, including one that led to the successful recovery of Vancouver Island marmots (Marmota vancouverensis) from the brink of extinction. Ken is also one of few mammalogists with an IMDb (Internet Movie Database) entry for a short film “The Study of Groundhogs: A Real Life Look at Marmots” included by Sony Pictures on the 15th anniversary edition of Groundhog Day, the 1993 classic Hollywood feature film starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. “If it works, there is no need for a new one,” was a standard that Ken lived by. This standard of course applied to the lab and the physiology equipment that his undergraduate and graduate students worked with. The lab was loaded with very old equipment—including an old Underwood typewriter long after all students were skilled computer users. He was proud when a historical society borrowed one of the lab refrigerators for a historical exhibit that they were doing on the 1950s. He was even more pleased when they returned it with a new paint job so it could go back into service in his lab! Despite his considerable success as an administrator and scientist, Ken probably would have ranked working with students his greatest pleasure and achievement as an academic. He directed the doctoral programs of 26 students, including Eisa M. Abdellatif (1985), Ernest E. Angino (1961), Erika L. Barthelmess (1997), Arthur L. Buikema, Jr. (1965), Lei Chi-Hsiang (1979), Jerry F. Downhower (1964), W. Sue Fairbanks (1992), Barbara A. Frase (1983), Kent D. Hall (1969), Patricia Johnstone (1971), Delbert L. Kilgore, Jr. (1972), John L. Koprowski (1991), Jaye C. Melcher (1987), Sherwick Min (1995), Kathleen R. Nuckolls (2010), Martha Roelofs Pippitt (1975), Linda S. Rayor (1988), Carmen M. Salsbury (1993), (1971), A. (1979), E. (1972), John M. Jr. (1971), and C. Ken also was the of students, including Eisa M. Abdellatif C. with R. S. C. Alison K. Brody (1992), C. (1985), W. Delbert L. Kilgore, Jr. L. A. M. and Jerry C. undergraduate students in research with Ken and his graduate students and four of those graduated with from KU, recognizing the quality of their undergraduate research Ken worked with a of researchers over the years and continued working with Ken in his later years and ultimately over the long-term marmot study at RMBL after Ken’s Ken’s mentorship included a in the of and students, the point that potential and the right to be a The of Ken’s later graduate students with 17 studying Many of his graduate students went on to have successful in at and which is an of the quality and education students received under Ken’s He great pleasure in with his students and he all with the of While his could be as he was and to any of his students along the He was a of work at our of Ken by He about his marmots for but he about the success and of his students. Ken’s kindness and support to a and in which his graduate students Ken received honors during his career. of the more recognized as a by the and the for the of an Award from the University of Kansas (1979), inducted into the University of Kansas of Beta (1991), and a Distinguished Award from his Bethany Ken would likely say that his most honor was the C. Award for Research from the of The Award is in recognition of outstanding research in mammalogy and many of us still the outstanding on his marmot research he gave in He was recognized by the as an for his service to the of it is the In he received a Award from RMBL in recognition of his years of service in and the laboratory and the half of Ken’s career, he also the work and he with many studying marmots in Europe and the At the Ken dedicated much of his efforts field and research to be there. Ken served as a leader on the field from its through its many for years and was Chair or Director for of those Ken’s the KU from small and focused to an active where research could and He an NSF to an and for at the field and later led a effort to a NSF to the with laboratories, a and for The now of over and for research and education as well as a of for and In honor of Ken’s to field research and student the University dedicated the new field the Kenneth and Katie Armitage in (Fig. the KU a known to to the University as the Armitage Ecology two first is to the Department of Ecology and Biology on campus and the is at the KU in the Armitage an in honor of Ken is provided to support research by an undergraduate or graduate student at the KU Kenneth B. Armitage Ken and Katie Armitage at the of the Armitage at the University of Kansas on April Photograph courtesy of W. Ken KU as a of the of Biological and served as the and of this from He also served on other including serving as a of the for the University after his retirement His work on the campus was by his love of a passion that he with his Ken was also a of the and served as from Any conversation with Ken included a of Katie and Ken’s most to some of the or the of in Lawrence during the Groundhog will never be the same the from Ken, and some of us fondly at his home. Those of us who were to him will forever his and on of his of and humor, and his Those to Ken are to to the Kansas University Lawrence, in the of the University of Kansas or the Armitage data are at of of the published of Dr. Kenneth B. Armitage the Armitage Karole, and their support throughout this for earlier of this and for family M. and M. provided on the W. provided the of Ken and Katie at the of the Kenneth Katie Armitage at the University of Kansas used as and the Rocky Mountain Biological Colorado provided the used as and in the used Their efforts and attention to the to our for

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