From the woods to the halls of science: Louis Bernatchez’s contributions to science, wildlife conservation and people

EvolutionaryApplications has produced a Special Issue to celebrate his accomplishments in applying evolutionary concepts to diverse fields (e.g.wildlife management, medicine, agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, conservation, environmental sciences, microbiology and toxicology) and for his far-reaching influence on people.The Special Issue features 25 papers that have been authored by 35 former students and postdocs trained in Louis' research group at Université Laval in Québec, Canada.These alumni together showcase Louis' wide and diverse impact on raising the next generation of scientists, not merely from a scientific point of view, but also as a mentor, who took great care of the future of his students who were about to take the next step in their career.Louis was born in 1960 into a family of three children, as the youngest child.He was raised alongside his two older sisters in the small 150-people community of Lac-Frontière in Québec, in the St.John River woodland on the border of Maine, USA, where the days were spent outdoors observing nature and going hunting and fishing (Figure 1).At that time, no one could have imagined that this child from the remote countryside would end up in the halls of academia and would pioneer new fields of science.Unlike for some of us, Louis' path into academia was not inspired by social influences but rather came from a strong and deep connection with nature, something that always stayed with him throughout his career.At the age of 12, Louis remembers, he already knew that he wanted to work as a biologist.He registered at the Université Laval in Québec and ticked Biology as the only option, not giving any thoughts to secondary choices.He was selected and studied Biology towards a BSc degree.At this time, Louis' scientific interest in fish was still relatively dormant (other than angling for them!), but this interest grew after his first summer university job working on a research project on migratory movement of Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) in a remote ecological reserve in Québec.His second summer university job brought him to the Cree community of Eastmain, along the eastern coast of James Bay, Québec, where he monitored fish populations that were impacted by a hydropower dam development.Louis spent a total of 11 months among the Cree community of Eastmain.Indeed, after his third undergraduate year at San José State, California, he began an MSc degree, supervised by Prof. Julian Dodson, still working in the Cree community on a project to compare the energetic cost of reproductive migration between anadromous Lake Whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) and Cisco (C.artedii) combining telemetry and respirometry (Bernatchez & Dodson, 1985;Dodson, Lambert, & Bernatchez, 1985).His work on whitefish migration stimulated him to publish a meta-analysis to investigate the general relationship between bioenergetics and behaviour in anadromous fish migrations (Bernatchez & Dodson, 1987).This first encounter with whitefish turned out to become a lifelong love story for Louis, and he devoted 30 years of his career to the pursuit of understanding adaptive divergence in the sympatric Lake Whitefish species pairs.After his MSc degree, he took an academic break and moved to Laniel, another remote community in western Québec wilderness, to help launch a project to harvest whitefish commercially, which led to the setup of a local start-up for the production of whitefish caviar!He found himself living among 65 other people, a place even smaller than his