Those who knew Gerry Fitz-Gerald almost as a force of nature were shocked when he died in March 1994 from a brain tumour. He was 44 years old. The energy, drive and determination he brought to his research reflected his vigorous life.
Gerry was born in Newfoundland. After taking his BSc at Memorial University, MSc at McGill University (with Dr Roger Bider) and PhD at the University of Western Ontario (with Dr Miles Keenleyside), he joined the biology department of the francophone Universit6 Laval in Ste Foy, Quebec, in 1976 as an Assistant Professor. Much to his amusement, he spent the first months of his career learning a unique form of French, walking the picket lines in the first general faculty strike at the University. He was quickly promoted to Associate (1981) and Full Professor (1985).
Being around Gerry was like being in a hurricane. He exuded raw energy. He loved kickboxing and once invited me to work through a series of knife-fighting exercises he had discovered in a Special Forces manual (I declined: I boxed with him but drew the line at knife fighting).
Gerry was a firm believer in the art of the possible. He was intensely focused and organized. If a new methodology could help his work, he found ways to get it into his laboratory. Deadlines were set early and met, preferably yesterday. When the timetable was not being met, his innate forcefulness would come to the fore. When he got angry his face turned beet red, and then it was astonishing how things suddenly got done.
Although famously assertive, he was one of the fairest people I have known, and ruthlessly honest. You knew exactly where you stood and what was right or wrong. He would also fight long and hard to right injustices, and hated falsehoods: I remember one instance where an undergraduate student entered his office and made a series of false accusations, but failed to notice the telltale colour change -Gerry opened his window and gave the student the choice of leaving of his own volition via the door, or involuntarily by the window (a sickeningly long drop).
Gerry loved evolutionary ecology and all elements of behavioural ecology, and was fascinated by aggression. He discovered the ideal organism for his research work in the threespine stickleback, and always credited Jean Brdard for the introduction. Recognizing the potential of the salt marshes at Ile Verte as a site for field studies on these fish,