Behavior Genetics, Vol. 32, No.
6, November 2002 (© 2002)
Announcement
Announcement of the Fulker Award for a Paper
Published in Behavior Genetics, Volume 31, 2001
The Fulker Award was established by the Behavior Ge-
netics Association in memory of David Fulker, a past
president of the association and executive editor of the
journal, who died in 1998 (Hewitt, 1998). The award
is for the best paper published in the journal during the
preceding year. The annual prize is $1000 and “a nice
bottle of wine.”
There were excellent papers in the January 2001
special issue on Mapping genes linked to behavioral
traits, including one on the Midbrain Dopaminergic Sys-
tem by Laszlo Saborsky and Csaba Vadasz that might well
provide the basis for neurobiological animal models of
several human diseases and traits. In the May issue there
was an important review of genes, evolution, and per-
sonality by Tom Bouchard and John Loehlin that will no
doubt be highly cited. And the special issue on Brain
function, memory, and cognition gave us a dozen ex-
amples of the contribution of behavior genetics to un-
derstanding these phenomena. These were just some of
the notable papers published throughout Volume 31.
If you ask 10 associate editors to help identify the
best paper, you will likely get 10 different nominations.
When you get some convergence, you ought to take no-
tice. This was the case this year. An extremely inter-
esting, well executed, and well written up study of the
genetics of conditioning of the proboscis extension re-
sponse in honey bees was published in the May issue.
The mating system and genetic properties of the honey
bee give it considerable potential for genetic studies.
Drone bees are haploid and so present a relatively sim-
ple system for selection and for the study of recombi-
nant haploid genotypes, honeybees have relatively low
levels of repetitive DNA, and they have a very high
497
rate of recombination that should facilitate map reso-
lution. The particular focus of this study was the dif-
ferentiation of reversal learning and latent inhibition,
phenotypes that had shown correlated responses in
selection studies. The study uses a wide range of in-
genious breeding and genetic techniques, as well as uti-
lizing carefully developed individual behavioral assays.
The QTLs detected for reversal learning and latent in-
hibition were unlinked, and thus did not provide sup-
port for pleiotropic effects. The authors are, however,
appropriately cautious in their conclusions. One of the
very nice aspects of this paper is that it draws attention
to other model systems that, because of the biology of
the organism, may have special utility in behavior ge-
netics. The paper is by Sathees Chandra, Gregory Hunt,
Susan Cobey, and Brian Smith of the Department of
Entomology, The Ohio State University. This year’s
Fulker award goes to these authors for their paper titled:
Quantitative trait loci associated with reversal learning
and latent inhibition in honey bees.
Winners of the Fulker Award for Volume 32, 2002,
will be announced at the June 2003 annual meeting of
the Behavior Genetics Association in Chicago, IL.
John K. Hewitt
Executive Editor
REFERENCES
Chandra, S. B. C., Hunt, G. J., Cobey, S., and Smith, B. H. (2001).
Quantitative trait loci associated with reversal learning and la-
tent inhibition in honeybees (Apis mellifera). Behav. Genet.
31:275–285.
Hewitt, J. K. (1998). David William Fulker (1937–1998). Behav.
Genet. 28:239–241.
0001-8244/02/1100-0497/0 © 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation