1. An Extraordinary Evolution

During the spring of 1975, an innovative, adventurous Washington and Lee biology professor, Cleveland Hickman, seized the opportunity offered by the university's six-week Spring Term to lead students on a field trip to the Galapagos Islands, where they could experience firsthand the wonders of Charles Darwin's living laboratory.

"I wanted the students to get an appreciation for Darwin's experiences by retracing his steps," says Hickman, who, at 97, still remembers the inaugural journey with five courageous biology majors. "That first trip was an amazing one because of the hardships and problems we had to work through. It was rough." Undeterred, Hickman would continue offering his six-credit course, Biology 216: Supervised Field Study, until he retired from teaching in 1994. By then, about 150 students had made the trek with him, and he had shifted his research from fish physiology to the Galapagos marine life.

Hickman became widely recognized as an international expert on the aquatic invertebrates of the Galapagos and had two species that he discovered named after him. In retirement, he published five field guides to the islands' marine invertebrates - sea stars and other echinoderms, crustaceans, marine molluscs, sponges, corals and other radiates. Each book features full-color illustrations and complete, diagnostic descriptions.

And now, his decades-long work is just a click or two away in a mobile app that has Washington and Lee fingerprints all over it.

The app, Galapagos Marine Life, is a collaborative effort by Dr. William Ober '70, Scott Henderson '87, Hickman's daughter, Diane Hickman Liss, his son-in-law, Dr. Frederic Liss, and officials from the Galapagos Conservancy. By offering detailed profiles of marine invertebrates, fishes, reptiles and mammals unique to the Galapagos, the app puts in-depth information in the hands of scientists, guides and visitors.

On the Origin

Long before the first iPhones were invented, Hickman got his first glimpse of the Galapagos in 1974 on a family vacation with his parents, both zoologists, and his wife, Rae.

"My dad was an admirer and devotee of Charles Darwin," Hickman says. "He had always wanted to visit Darwin's haunts."

Hickman returned from that vacation with an idea. "Our biology students," he says, "should see what I saw. It would be a great opportunity for them to be introduced to this unique environment."

He didn't waste time. Within a year, the new course was in the catalog, and a six-member traveling party was on its way to the islands, where the students would study the amazing array of endemic species, including the famous Galapagos tortoises and Darwin's finches.

It would prove to be a memorable trip on many accounts.

In fact, 50 years later, Peter Adler '76 retains profound memories of the experience - like staring directly into the eyes of a Galapagos hawk from inches away or sitting directly in front of nesting albatrosses. "All this time later I can remember almost every feather of that hawk," he says. "There were no restrictions back then. We were able to go right up to the wildlife. It remains a moving experience for me even now."

An emeritus professor of entomology at Clemson University, Adler led many field trips around the world for his own research. When he compares his many excursions to that Galapagos trip, he still marvels at the filth the students encountered - from their roach-infested boat to a restaurant with pigs milling around on dirt floors.

But what continues to impress Adler is how nothing seemed to faze his professor.

"Cleve was unflappable and indefatigable," Adler says. "Given the immense responsibility he had for all of us, Cleve's enthusiasm never waned, no matter what happened. His approach inspires me to this day."

Hickman acknowledges that he hadn't considered all the ramifications of taking college students to a desert island. "I was probably less concerned with the possible repercussions than I should have been. I thought a lot about that later," he says. "It was one thing after another, especially on those early trips."

One of the stickiest situations occurred on the second trip when a group of students got lost for three days. They had hiked up the Alcedo Volcano to view the famous tortoises but went astray on the way down.

"A Belgian botanist had told them about a shortcut, and the trip up had been tough so that they jumped at the word 'shortcut,'" says Hickman. They all returned safely, and their ordeal became front-page news for the Ring-tum Phi.

Ober, a resident at the University of Virginia School of Medicine at the time, was serving as the group physician on the "missing boys" trip. At W&L, Ober had not only been a student of Hickman's but had also worked closely with him as the illustrator of research papers and books.

"One of the students on that trip had diabetes. Cleve was uncomfortable with not having a doctor along because there was no medical care in the islands, so he invited me to join them," says Ober, who went on many subsequent student and research trips.

Like Adler, Ober thinks W&L's Galapagos program required someone with Hickman's equanimity.

"Things that would have upset me for a week upset him for about 15 minutes," says Ober, a talented medical illustrator who has worked on Hickman's zoology textbooks.

Henderson was a sophomore when he took the 1983 trip and has never forgotten his introduction to the Galapagos Islands. One of the strongest El Nino events ever recorded had soaked the group of islands for months before the students landed in a veritable quagmire.

"The roads were washed out, and we rode on top of our bus through this deep, deep mud," says Henderson. "The bus's fuel pump was broken, and a guy was sitting up on the roof with us and pouring gasoline through a tube into the engine to keep us going. It was a crazy way to start a field trip."

Henderson believes the trips were transformational for most of the participants but especially for him. He moved to the Galapagos after graduation, met and married his wife, Maria Elena Guerra, and has lived and worked there ever since. In 2003, he opened Conservation International's office in the Galapagos. He's steadily moved up the organizational chart over the past 22 years, and, in his current position as vice president of Conservation International and managing director of the organization's Galapagos program, he is focused on securing funding and developing partnerships. In addition, he and his wife, who works for the World Wildlife Fund, own and operate an organic coffee farm, Lava Java, in the highlands of Santa Cruz, the most populated island in the archipelago.

There's an App for That

As challenging as the logistics were, Hickman knew he also had to convince the students that, despite being on a tropical island, they weren't on spring break.

"I had to keep them busy, and it was an opportunity for them to be engaged in a significant research project," Hickman says. "We started doing intertidal surveys that would benefit the Charles Darwin Research Station. So, we started dividing the intertidal zone into subtidals and enumerating the animals students found in each zone.

"The goal was to get an idea of the change in the animal biota as you went from the high tide to low tide. If you have student groups do this every couple of years on their trips, you could get a longitudinal picture," he says.

Because so many of the specimens were endemic to the islands, identifying them was often impossible. Hickman took a sabbatical to the University of Oxford, where the literature of the organisms was housed, and then created his own field guides, sewing the pages together by hand.

"The guides were primitive," says Hickman, "but they helped the students identify what they were finding. I made about 20 guides for the students, but when people at the Darwin Field Station saw them, they all wanted one." And when the Galapagos officials faced a crisis with the overfishing of sea cucumbers by commercial fishermen, they turned to Hickman to help them understand and identify the species.

Once he retired, Hickman set up a lab in an attic space in Howe Hall and worked full-time on the guides. Ober and Henderson often joined him when he made self-funded research trips back to the islands. "The guides are the definition of a labor of love," says Henderson, who worked on all of them. "Cleve financed all the work out of his own pocket."

Adds Ober: "The guides would represent one scientist's lifetime achievement. And Cleve did it as a retirement project!"

When the idea arose to put all of Hickman's work on a mobile application, Ober and Diane Hickman Liss spearheaded the project and wrote a proposal to the Galapagos Conservancy to secure funding. James Gibbs, president of the conservancy, and Dan Sherman, chair of the board, both offered their support, and Sherman volunteered to do the coding.

The list of contributors to the app is long and includes more than 40 worldwide experts, but the app has deep ties to Washington and Lee. Ober organized the mountains of material and provided many of the illustrations. Henderson coordinated the translation of the app into Spanish and provided much of the underwater photography, including the hammerhead shark that is the app's icon.

Then, there are all those W&L students who spent Spring Term in the Galapagos and whose work on intertidal surveys caused Hickman to create those first handsewn field guides, the old-fashioned forerunners of the Galapagos Marine Life app.

According to Gibbs, the app is in a beta version for IOS devices while work is underway on an Android version. "Our guides are currently using the app and are promoting it with visitors," Gibbs says. "We are also getting feedback from different community organizations before we launch it with a big rollout."

Sherman remembers when Hickman got his first look at the Galapagos Marine Life app. "We loaded a functional prototype on Cleve's phone; I got to see him use it over a Zoom call. His face lit up. That was really gratifying," says Sherman.

Hickman is rather in awe of the project.

"It's wonderful," says Hickman, "but I honestly didn't have that much to do with it."

Ober begs to differ: "He merely contributed four decades' worth of research."