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Alumni Profiles
From Antarctica to Southeast Asia:
Studying the Natural Enemies
of Invasive Insects
Paul W. Schaefer ’66, ’74 Ph.D.
By Abigail Zelz
It was late fall in 1962 and the weather in
Orono was raw and miserable. Freshman
Paul Schaefer found himself
outside in the bitter cold University of
Maine forest measuring trees for a forestry
course—measurements used to calculate
board feet of lumber for commercial use.
He was struck by how that perspective on
trees contrasted with an entomology course
he was also taking. In that course he was
considering trees as food for insects.
Calculating lumber left him cold, but he
found the food for insects perspective fascinating.
So that December, after a particularly
uncomfortable, frigid session in the
forest when his gloved hands were too cold
to handle the forestry measuring chain
easily, the Rocky Hill, Connecticut, native
changed his major to entomology.
He was glad to leave the sleet and wind
of the forest. And the diversity of insect
species as well as employment opportunities
in entomology appealed to him. Looking
back, he credits UMaine with providing
him with the foundation for his “delightful
career.”
Schaefer arrived on campus after four
years in the Coast Guard, attracted by the
University’s wildlife management
program. He settled into campus life,
devoting most of his time to his job as resident
assistant in Oak and Hannibal Hamlin
halls and to his studies.
Fieldwork and graduate school
Graduating in 1966, he was accepted to the
master’s program at the University of
Hawaii. But before moving to Hawaii, he
contacted that state’s Bishop Museum to
inquire about becoming involved in some
of their research. They replied with an offer
of field research in Antarctica. So prior to
working on a master’s in the tropics, Schaefer
joined other researchers at McMurdo
Station and other locations in the vast,
frozen landscape for an autumnal summer.
“I spent a lot of time lying on my stomach,”
he recalls, looking for and preserving
free-living mites. These tiny creatures feed
on lichens and mosses, living wherever
there is freestanding water. While admiring
the dramatic geological features of the icy
continent, he focused on the mites and
parasites that live among the feathers of
skuas and penguins or the fur of seals.
Shortly after his Antarctic experience,
he married his wife, Jane, who had been a
Peace Corps volunteer in Valdivia, Chile.
They moved to Hawaii, where they both
earned master’s degrees. Afterward, they
celebrated by taking a circuitous trip
through Asia and Europe, and back to
Connecticut where Schaefer worked at the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment
Station (CAES) in New Haven. He had
spent summers at CAES as an undergraduate,
working with the staff on infestations
of the gypsy moth in Connecticut’s oak
forests. When one of his supervisors, David
E. Leonard, left CAES to join the faculty at
UMaine, he suggested Schaefer consider
applying to Orono’s Ph.D. program.
Schaefer returned to Orono in 1970 with
his young family and pursued graduate
studies under the guidance of Leonard,
Eben Osgood, Geddes Simpson, and John
Diamond. At the time, Leonard was
researching the North American gypsy
moth, a pesky species that was defoliating
hardwood forests in New England and
spreading. The population of the destructive
gypsy moth was increasing, infesting
densely populated areas and feasting on a
variety of trees and shrubs in forests, neighborhoods,
parks, and gardens. Because the
gypsy moth survives on a wide variety of
trees and shrubs—from oak, apple, poplar,
willow, and hickory—it can migrate to
different areas. In severe outbreaks, the
moths consume enough tree leaves to
weaken and sometimes kill the trees. The
infestation peaked in New England in the
early 1980s, but in the early 1970s, gypsy
moths were a real nuisance, destroying
20 MAINE Alumni Magazine