Robert W. Lichtwardt (November 27, 1924 – February 9, 2018) was a Brazilian-born American mycologist specializing in the study of arthropod-associated, gut-dwelling fungi (trichomycetes).
[1][2][3] Lichtwardt was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to American parents, and consequently had dual citizenship to both countries.
When World War II began, he served for several years at the Embassy in a disbursing position at the Naval Operating Base for the South Atlantic in Rio.
[4] After moving to Ohio in 1945, Lichtwardt began his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
[5] After taking a field biology course taught by George T. Jones,[4] Lichtwardt decided to pursue a master's degree in botany, with an emphasis in Mycology, at the University of Illinois.
Enterobryus species are millipede gut-associated microorganisms that were confirmed as non-fungal protists in 2005,[7] but share morphological traits with the fungal trichomycetes.
Collections of millipede hosts used in Lichtwardt's thesis research were made at the University of Michigan Biological Station, Douglas Lake, Michigan, the Highlands Biological Station, Highlands, North Carolina, and from Champaign County, Illinois[6] While taking an undergraduate course in field biology at Oberlin, Lichtwardt met his future wife Betty Thomas.
They were married in 1951 and have two children[4] Lichtwardt was among the first to receive the newly offered post-doctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation in 1954.
He pioneered studies in the tropics, expanded work on marine taxa, and collaborated internationally with various mycologists.
work led to over 100 taxon descriptions,[11] including validation (along with one of his French collaborators, Manier) of the order Harpellales that circumscribes nearly all species of trichomycetes.
[1]:[13] This protist species was collected from the guts of squat lobsters living around deep sea hydrothermal vents (~2,600 m depth) at the Galapagos Rift and East Pacific Rise.
[1] Trichozygospora chironomidarum [3] Lichtwardt, 1972:[15] This species has been collected from hosts in cold, mountainous streams in the Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, the Abiskojåkka river some 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, and a stream draining from the Steingletscher glacier in Switzerland.
[1] From collections in various geographic locations, Lichtwardt proposed two main hypotheses regarding historical trichomycete distributions: First, that “ancestral trichomycetes began to adapt to arthropod gut habitation shortly after insects began to evolve in aquatic habitats some 250 to 190 million years BP.”[1] Second, that trichomycetes were associated with their arthropod hosts prior to the breakup of Pangea, thus accounting for the cosmopolitan distribution of some species and genera.
He grew over 150 trichomycete isolates in axenic culture,[16][1] a critical step for experimental studies on nutritional modes and mating types as well as molecular and ultrastructural analyses.
Morphological, cytological, and taxonomic observations on species of Enterobryus from the hindgut of certain millipedes and beetles.
Studies on the nutritional relationship of larval Aedes aegypti (Diptera: Culicidae) with Smittium culisetae (Trichomycetes).