14 Facts About Winifred Hallwachs

Winifred Hallwachs was born on October 11,1954 and is an American tropical ecologist who helped to establish and expand northwestern Costa Rica's Area de Conservacion Guanacaste.

Winifred Hallwachs grew up in New York State and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1976, Winifred Hallwachs graduated from Princeton University with a BA in biochemistry.

Winifred Hallwachs returned to Philadelphia, where she enrolled in Daniel Janzen's "Habitat and Organisms" course at the University of Pennsylvania.

Winifred Hallwachs joined Janzen as a volunteer on his next trip to Costa Rica.

In Guanacaste, Winifred Hallwachs identified the animal-plant interaction that would become the focus of her doctoral research.

Winifred Hallwachs' focused her early research on the Central American agoutis as seed hoarders and the details of their seed dispersers of the guapinol and other primary forest trees.

Winifred Hallwachs fitted fruits with spools of thread to follow the trails of the agoutis to their secret hoards.

Winifred Hallwachs spent thousands of daylight hours observing them, collecting data for over five years.

Winifred Hallwachs demonstrated that agoutis provided an essential method of secondary seed dispersal, by harvesting seeds which are found on the forest floor and preferentially burying larger ones in shallow caches outside the area of the parent plant.

Winifred Hallwachs finally completed her PhD in 1994 at Cornell University, with Pamela Parker as her thesis advisor.

Winifred Hallwachs's dissertation was In The Clumsy Dance Between Agoutis and Plants: Scatterhoarding by Costa Rican Dry Forest Agoutis.

In November 2017, Winifred Hallwachs gave the keynote address "Conservation, Onychorhynchus, and Female Parataxonomists" at the XXI Congress for the Mesoamerican Society for Biology and Conservation.

Winifred Hallwachs emphasized the importance of women working as parataxonomists.