Eric Rodger Pianka (January 23, 1939 – September 12, 2022) was an American herpetologist and evolutionary ecologist. Early life Pianka was born in Siskiyou County in 1939. At age 13, he was seriously injured in a bazooka blast in the front yard of his childhood home in Yreka, California. His left leg became gangrenous, and he lost 10 cm of his tibia, as well as the terminal digit of the middle finger on his right hand. Pianka's childhood injury left him with a short and partially paralyzed leg. In later life, his short leg resulted in spinal scoliosis and cervical spondylosis. Pianka graduated from Carleton College (B.A., 1960) and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1965. He went on to do postdoctoral work with ecologist Robert MacArthur at Princeton University. This period, during which he worked closely with the temporarily studentless MacArthur, had a major influence on Pianka's thinking. In 1966, with MacArthur, Pianka coauthored the paper, "On optimal use of a patchy environment". Pianka frequently mentioned MacArthur in his lectures and kept a webpage for his deceased mentor and colleague. In some ways, Pianka's own research program expands upon and continues the work that he and MacArthur began. Career Since 1968, Pianka had been on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. His research centered on empirical and theoretical components of natural history, systematics, community and landscape ecology. Pianka had performed extensive ecological investigations on vertebrate communities in three desert systems on three continents: the Great Basin, Mojave, and Sonora Deserts in North America; the Kalahari in Africa; and the Great Victoria desert in Western Australia. His monographic treatment of this work is a landmark ecological synthesis (Pianka, 1986). Pianka's latest work focused on lizard communities in Australia. His research projects included study of the phylogeny and ecology of a number of groups of Australian lizards and an extensive study of the unique biotic landscape produced by Australian brush fires. His favorite lizard was a small Australian goanna, Varanus eremius. In his research, Pianka combined traditional field biological methods with recent technological innovations in statistical analysis, phylogenetic reconstruction, and imaging of the Earth's surface in attempts to answer major questions about evolution and ecology. Pianka had trained other scientists and twelve of his former graduate students are professors at major universities, including Kirk Winemiller, a professor at Texas A&M University, and Raymond Huey, a