Peter Graves’ death put me in mind of the Airplane films. Which in turn reminded me about the Tyler Prize USC awarded last week.
What’s the fastest animal on earth?
The cheetah.
Airplane 2′s information booth guy is right. (Though Airplane is funnier.) But the downside to bursting fast after prey is that cheetahs aren’t really excellent at anything else. Except capturing the attention of Laurie Marker, one of the two people awarded the Tyler Prize this year.
Laurie Marker is executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund. She saw a cheetah population in crisis – numbers dwindling, animals inbred by necessity and more susceptible to genetic disorders – and she started figuring out how Namibian farmers and conservationists could get together to help the farmers’ cattle thrive without having to kill cheetahs on sight.
Incidentally, Marker’s born an Angeleno; her father worked in aerospace and kept animals of all sizes around. You can read more about her in a pretty fascinating Smithsonian magazine profile that came out a couple years back.
USC’s done this since 1973. Marker’s cohonoree is Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecology professor at Duke University. Edward O. Wilson, in nominating Pimm for the prize, said research projects and writings Pimm has made on subjects like food webs and their role in extinction “serve as an environmental conservation template.”
More about Pimm’s worldview can be found in this Duke magazine article.
The committee making the awards said Marker and Pimm are being honored “for their scientific contributions, their understanding of ecosystem functions, and for their applications of this knowledge to the management and restoration of ecosystems to the benefit of their inhabitants.”
Marker and Pimm will split a $200,000 prize, get some gold medals, and maybe most interestingly, speak on April 22 at 2 pm at the Davidson Conference Center at USC.
