Robert Treat Paine III was a professor of zoology at the University of Washington from 1962 until his death in 2016. He is widely known in the field of ecology as the originator of the keystone species hypothesis, which posited that some species (typically large predators) have a disproportionately large effect on the biological communities in which they occur.

Robert Paine was born on April 13, 1933 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a B.S. in 1954 from Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in zoology in 1961 from the University of Michigan. In 1962, he joined the faculty of the University of Washington as an assistant professor in the department of zoology. Paine remained at the University of Washington throughout the remainder of his career, with promotions to associate professor in 1967 and full professor in 1971, and chair of the Zoology Department 1990-1998. He was granted emeritus status on his retirement in 1998, and continued an active research program until his death on June 13, 2016.

Paine was a pioneer in experimental approaches to the study of ecology, rather than reliance primarily on environmental observation. His experiments removing ochre sea stars from a rocky shoreline and observing resulting changes in species diversity led to his publication in 1966 of his landmark paper “Food web complexity and species diversity” in American Naturalist and his development of the keystone species concept. Even after reaching emeritus status, he maintained an active research program at his long-term study site on Tatoosh Island, on the outer coast of Washington state. Work on Tatoosh has been carried out with the permission of the Makah Tribe, for whom the island is part of their cultural home. Paine wrote his observations on plastic slates, each one then run through a copier for transfer to paper and preserved by being taped into a leather-bound book. This series is now up to more than 20 volumes, containing decades of records of weather, bird lists, contents of the wrack line on the beach, as well as experimental results.

Paine’s awards and recognitions include delivery of the third Tansley Lecture to the British Ecological Society (1979), the MacArthur Award for lifetime achievement from the Ecological Society of America (1983), the ECI prize from the Ecology Institute in Germany (1989), and the International Cosmos Prize (2013). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986.

[https://www.biology.washington.edu/news/prof-emeritus-bob-paine-1933-2016]