Dr. Edmund Arimantas Arbas, Ph.D., died on June 18, 1995, in a boating accident while on holiday with his family in Mexico. His sudden death is a great loss to the international neuroscience community, as Dr. Arbas was a leader in the fields of neuroethology and the evolution of nervous systems. Raised by Lithuanian parents near the ocean in California, Dr. Arbas developed an early love for nature and, especially, the diversity of biological organisms at the shore. In school he became passionately interested in the control of animal behavior by the nervous system and in how neural circuits have evolved to generate different behaviors. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1980, pursued postdoctoral training at Harvard university and at the University of Florida, and obtained a faculty position at the University of Arizona, where he was an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology at the time of his death. His research, published in numerous prestigious scientific journals, spanned many levels of neuroscience, from biophysical investigations of the properties of nerve cells that generate behavior in several invertebrate species to evolutionary comparisons of neural structure, function, and circuitry in insects. One of the most elegant and influential studies he and his colleagues conducted involved monitoring and analyzing the outflow of motor commands from the nervous system during odor-modulated flight in freely flying insects, to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of neural strategies used by even "simple" animals to generate what appear to be "simple" rhythmic movements. Dr. Arbas served on the editorial board of the Lithuanian journal "Pheromones" and on university and national committees involved with science education at all levels. He was a gifted teacher, equipped with a depth of knowledge and understanding of biology and a lively sense of humor that allowed him to make difficult concepts easy to grasp; he also served as a superb role model for his students. As family man, neuroscientist, and educator. Dr. Arbas will be missed deeply.

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