David B. Wake (1936–2021)

Dave and Marvalee Wake in 2013 (top) and Dave with his newborn granddaughter in 2005 (below). Top photo copyright Chuck Crumly, used with permission. Bottom photo copyright Tom Wake, used with permission.

Phylogenetic tree of the Plethodontidae from Wake (1966), showing four major clades recognized based on morphological data. Genera in gray have been sunk since then. Maroon branches indicate taxa whose relationships based on morphological data differ substantially from the currently supported phylogenies.

Dave Wake in the field. (A) Dave in 1975 or 1976 sharing a find with a local child along the Cerro San Felipa transect in Guatemala. (B) Dave in the habitat of Urspelerpes brucei in 2016, just after he saw the species in life for the first time. (C) Dave shows a Bolitoglossa to a crowd of other plethodontologists, in 2007 on a field trip up Cerro Zontehuiz during the Fifth Conference on the Biology of Plethodontid Salamanders in Chiapas, Mexico. (D) Dave in 1994 with Mario García-París and Pedro León in Costa Rica, after digging successfully for Oedipina uniformis. Photo in A copyright Martin Feder, used with permission; photo in C copyright James Hanken, used with permission.

Genus-level phylogeny of the Plethodontidae (based on Shen et al., 2016), with bolitoglossine sampling expanded according to Decena-Segarra et al. (2020) and spelerpines according to Wray and Steppan (2017); genera described since 1966 and major changes in inferred relationships are highlighted. Species-level diversity is graphed on the right, indicating the number of species currently in each genus that were recognized by Wake (1966), the number described since then by David Wake and his trainees, and other species recognized since 1966. Note that the bar for Bolitoglossa is split into two columns.

The first and one of the last species described by Dave Wake. (A) Bolitoglossa phalarosoma Wake and Brame 1962 from Colombia (reprinted from source) and (B) Aneides klamathensis Reilly and Wake 2019 (photo: M. Mulks, used under a CC-BY-4.0 license).

Dave Wake (front row, third from left) in 2007 with several generations of his academic descendants at the Fifth Conference on the Biology of Plethodontid Salamanders in Chiapas, Mexico.