Bob Paine, ecologist who introduced the concept of ‘keystone species,’ dies at 83

Robert “Bob” Paine, an influential ecologist best known for introducing the concept of “keystone species” and who nurtured a generation of scientists, has died. He was 83.

Paine, a retired zoology professor at the University of Washington, died Monday of acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer, at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, according to UW biology professor Jennifer Ruesink, who was informed of Paine’s death by one of his daughters.

“He’s a giant in the field of ecology,” said Ruesink, who worked alongside Paine and as a graduate student in his lab.

During the 1960s, Paine conducted experiments off the coast of Washington state that gave birth to the idea that certain species, which he labeled keystone species, play an outsized role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystem.

He showed that by removing a top predator, a common sea star, from the shoreline, dramatic changes occurred. The mussels that the starfish feed upon took over and pushed out other species, lowering biodiversity.

“He essentially used the rocky inter-tidal – tide pools and things like that – as the example of how ecosystems and biological communities function,” said Robert Warner, distinguish research professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbera.

Paine was among those who demonstrated the power of conducting experiments in the field, which wasn’t as routinely done then as it is now.

“He referred to it as `Rambo ecology’ because you had to do dramatic intervention to understand how the natural world works,” Ruesink said.

Paine was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1933. He received a bachelor’s from Harvard in 1954 and his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1961. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1962 as zoology professor. He retired in 1998.

Discussing his inclination to study the natural world in an interview in 2013, Paine recalled sitting in a dirt driveway as a toddler, being “utterly fascinated” with ants.

Paine also spent years studying the ecology of the small uninhabited island of Tatoosh, off the northwest tip of Washington, with the permission of the Makah tribe.