John Buck, 92, Studied The Glowing Of Fireflies

April 4, 2005|By Jeremy Pearce The New York Times

John B. Buck, a biologist whose studies of fireflies advanced understanding of their behavior and explained their often spectacular displays of synchronized glowing, died Wednesday at his home in Sykesville, Md., near Baltimore. He was 92.

The cause was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his family said.

Dr. Buck, who spent four decades at the National Institutes of Health, pursued research in the property of glowing, called bioluminescence, in soft corals and other organisms and was known chiefly for his work with fireflies in Jamaica, Thailand and New Guinea.

Vast displays of fireflies glowing in unison along tidal rivers had been reported in Southeast Asia and other regions for centuries but had not been recorded or closely studied. In the 1960s, Dr. Buck, assisted by his wife, Elisabeth, and others, set out to make the first measurements of the phenomenon by attaching a series of light meters to an electrocardiogram machine.

Describing their experience in Thailand, Dr. Buck wrote in a 1968 article for the journal Science: "As we drew in toward the dark shoreline, pale nebulous patches began to resolve, at a distance of 30 meters or so, into bushes or trees spangled with hundreds of tiny lights pulsing steadily in a rapid rhythm of about two per second."

"Each time we saw this hurrying, soundless, hypnotic, enduring performance," he continued, "it impressed us anew as uniquely different from any behavior we had ever seen."

After establishing that fireflies were flashing codes of light to one another and did indeed synchronize their signals, Dr. Buck and others explained the behavior as primarily a mating call in which male flies were attracting females. In other work, he found that different species of fireflies made distinct signals based on the timing of light pulses, rather than on the light's color or intensity.

Dr. James F. Case, an emeritus professor of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said Dr. Buck's fieldwork had "influenced any number of young investigators." Before the Bucks, Case added, there had never been any truly scientific study on the synchrony in fireflies.

Dr. Buck's interest began in the 1930s, when, as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, he measured periods between firefly flashes and studied the effects of temperature and fading daylight, among other factors, on their display.

Later in his career, he looked at the evolutionary advantages of bioluminescence in a wide variety of sea and land organisms and helped develop the notion that it might account for the presence of well-developed eyes on some organisms in deep waters, living beyond the reach of surface light. He also published studies on insect respiration and on neural control in the firefly's flashing.

John Bonner Buck was born in Hartford, Conn., and received his doctorate in zoology from Johns Hopkins in 1936.

After teaching at the University of Rochester from 1939 to 1945, he joined the National Institutes of Health. He was named chief of the Laboratory of Physical Biology at the institutes in 1962 and chief of the Section of Comparative Physiology in 1975. He retired in 1985.

Throughout his career, Dr. Buck was affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., where he was an instructor and a trustee. He was elected president of the Society of General Physiologists in 1960 and was also a former vice president of the American Society of Zoologists.

He is survived by his wife, the former Elisabeth Mast, of Sykesville and Woods Hole; two sons, Alan of Pocasset, Mass., and Peter of Alexandria, Va.; two daughters, Susan Hibbitt of Bristol, R.I., and Judith Gyovai of Woods Hole; 12 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

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