A. Stanley Rand Dies; Smithsonian Expert On Frogs and Lizards
Washington Post
A. Stanley Rand, 73, a Smithsonian staff scientist known for his research in herpetology, died of complications from cancer Nov. 14 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Dr. Rand spent 33 years in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His work on frogs and lizards built him an international reputation, colleagues said, and he made significant contributions in animal communication, territoriality, sexual selection and anti-predator systems.
A prolific writer, he published his first scientific article in 1944, when he was 12 years old and presumably assisting his father, a well-known ornithologist, in Canada. His next publication occurred in 1950, while he was working as an 18-year-old assistant in the division of amphibians and reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He wrote or edited more than 150 scientific journal articles and books, including “Ecology of a Tropical Forest: Seasonal Rhythms and Long-Term Changes” (1982) and “Iguanas of the World: Their Behavior, Ecology and Conservation” (1982). He established the tngara frog project in Gamboa, Panama, attracting numerous scientists and students from around the world.
His research on occasion burst out of the intensely observed world of scientific publications and into the mass media. His work was written up several times in the New York Times, including in a 1977 series on the creative process of scientific research. In 1995, his study on the evolving songs of tngara frogs attracted the attention of a Dallas Morning News writer, who waxed poetic over the mating calls of amphibians.
