Robert Frederick Inger (1920–2019)

Abstract

L ONG-time Field Museum Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles, DR. ROBERT ‘‘BOB’’ FREDERICK INGER, died on April 12, 2019, at the age of 98. He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Tan Fui Lian, his brother and his wife, Morton and Sharon, of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and his nephew and nieces, Daniel, Rachel, and Miriam. He was predeceased by his first wife, Mary Lee (1918–1985), and his parents, Jacob and Anna. Bob was born in St. Louis on September 10, 1920 and listed his ancestry as Polish on a Field Museum position application in 1946. He came to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago in 1937, based on the recommendation of a curator at the St. Louis Zoological Park (Emerson, 1989). Bob received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1942. After serving in General Patton’s Army in World War II as a ground map maker, he returned to the University of Chicago and completed his Ph.D. in zoology in 1954 (Stewart and Emerson, 2002). Bob’s association of over 75 years with the Field Museum of Natural History began when he volunteered as an undergraduate in the early 1940s. He and another student, Philip Jason Clark (1920–1964), decided to volunteer in the Division of Amphibians and Reptiles. Instead of the projects that volunteers were usually given, Curator Karl P. Schmidt (1890–1957) engaged them in a study of scale reduction in snakes. They published the resulting papers in Copeia in 1942 (Emerson, 1989). Bob became a staff member of the Field Museum in early 1946, when he was hired as an assistant to Clifford H. Pope (1899–1974) in Amphibians and Reptiles for 50 hours each month at 75 cents an hour. He spent his spare time conducting his doctoral research, and he held this position until he was appointed Assistant Curator of Fishes in 1949. Bob then succeeded Clifford H. Pope as Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles on January 1, 1954. In 1966 and 1967, he took leave from the Museum to serve as Program Director for Environmental Biology for the National Science Foundation. He left Amphibians and Reptiles again from 1970 to 1977 to become Chairman of Scientific Programs for the Museum, and later, Assistant Director for Science and Education. During his tenure as Assistant Director, Bob revised the curatorial promotion, ranks, and tenure policies to align more with those in universities. His efforts had a profound impact on raising the stature of research at the Museum. In 1978, he returned to his curatorial position in Amphibians and Reptiles where he continued until retirement in September 1994. Appointed Curator Emeritus in 1995, he passionately continued his research and fieldwork. For decades after retirement, he was in his museum lab almost every weekday. Early in his Field Museum career, Bob began to specialize in the systematics, ecology, and zoogeography of the fish, amphibians, and reptiles of Southeast Asia. His interest in these groups was strongly influenced by Karl P. Schmidt and led to his life-long association with the Field Museum. The intellectual trajectory of Bob’s research career was shaped during his graduate work at the University of Chicago where he studied the 1949 classic, Principles of Animal Ecology, by ‘‘the great AEPPS’’—Allee, Emerson, Park, Park, and Schmidt—and shortly thereafter, the work of G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903–1991) on the nature of the ecological niche and the concept of niche breadth (Hutchinson, 1957). As a curator in Amphibians and Reptiles in the mid-1950s, Bob realized that museums and museum science needed to grow beyond providing a warehouse of specimens with geographic records, and that doing so meant becoming an integral part of the scientific enterprise. Thus, he developed a proposal to the National Science Foundation to test several theoretical ideas about ecological niches. He would go to an undisturbed, mature Old World tropical rain forest in Borneo and sample the amphibian and reptile community over several years. He collected details on the exact position in the environment of each specimen. In addition, dissections, histological work, and analyses of stomach contents made in the laboratory back in Chicago would allow each species’ ecological niche to be described in both language and mathematical terms. This approach proved highly successful. It contributed to our understanding of the niche parameters of amphibians and reptiles in Bornean rain forests. It also provided a blueprint for how museum curators could fulfill their traditional duties and, at the same time, play an active role in the global scientific enterprise. While Bob’s research and associated fieldwork concentrated on the ecology of amphibian and reptile communities in Asian forests with emphasis on Sabah and Sarawak, the Malaysian states in Borneo (Fig. 1), Bob was also recognized as the world’s leading authority on the frogs of Borneo. In the early and mid-1980s, his research expanded to the study of the ecology and morphology of Bornean tadpoles. In collaboration with Harold Voris, he analyzed the relative abundance of amphibians and reptiles at a single site in Sarawak between two collecting events that were two decades apart (Fig. 2). Other collaborations resulted in publications on various aspects of the ecology and systematics of Bornean amphibians and reptiles. The impact of Bob’s research