Early career DeVries was born in
Detroit, Michigan to Henry William DeVries and Helen Mary DeVries (née Brnabic). His early interest in Biology was nourished by close contact with nature during his childhood in rural Michigan. As an undergraduate student at the
University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, DeVries was mentored in
botany by professor
Warren H. Wagner Jr., known among colleagues as "Herb". In 1975, DeVries received a
Bachelor's degree from the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, with emphasis in botany. His early exposure to systematic botany continued to be useful in his career. From 1975 to 1980, he was a curator of
Lepidoptera at the Museo Nacional de
Costa Rica as a
Peace Corps volunteer where he built the country's first major butterfly collection. DeVries traveled widely in Costa Rica, collecting and making observations on butterflies. This eventually provided a large body of information that formed the basis for his two volumes entitled "The Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History" (vol. 1 and 2). In
Costa Rica, he interacted with many field biologists, including
Daniel Janzen,
Stephen P. Hubbell,
Alwyn Gentry,
Robin B. Foster,
Lawrence E. Gilbert,
Paul R. Ehrlich, and
Russell Lande. DeVries attended the
University of Texas at Austin from 1980 to 1987, where he earned a PhD in
Zoology. His doctoral work focused on the widespread symbioses between butterfly caterpillars, ants and plants, which he popularized under the nickname "
Singing caterpillars". In 1982, DeVries received a fellowship from the
Fulbright Program to visit The
Natural History Museum in
London (then British Museum of Natural History), where he spent a year preparing the first volume of his "The Butterflies of Costa Rica" book. There, he collaborated with
Bernard d'Abrera and other curators and visitors deeply rooted in the history of butterfly biology, evolution and systematics. In 1988, DeVries received a
MacArthur Fellowship that allowed him to travel broadly in pursuit of tropical biology in
Costa Rica,
Panama,
Ecuador, and
Argentina. Through the
MacArthur Fellows Program, he became close friends with the artists
Lee Friedlander,
Steve Lacy,
John T. Scott,
Brad Leithauser, and the historian
Cornell Fleischer. He was a pre-doctoral (1985–1986) and post-doctoral fellow (1987–1988) at the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, a visiting scholar at the
University of Oxford, UK (1990–1991), an associate of the Center for Conservation Biology at
Stanford University (1990–1992), and a
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellow at
Harvard University (1993–1994). He is a research associate of the
American Museum of Natural History,
Missouri Botanical Gardens,
Museum of Comparative Zoology,
Harvard University and the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Among other countries, DeVries has done field research in
Costa Rica,
Panama,
Ecuador,
Peru,
Brazil,
South Africa,
Uganda,
Tanzania,
Madagascar,
Bhutan,
Australia,
Borneo,
Malaysia.
Later career DeVries was an assistant professor at the
University of Oregon (1994–2000), where he developed trapping methods to accrue long-term data sets on tropical butterfly communities. Work with his colleague
Russell Lande produced some of the first rigorous insights into the spatial and temporal dynamics of diverse rainforest insect communities. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Director of the Center for Biodiversity Studies and curator of Lepidoptera at the
Milwaukee Public Museum in
Wisconsin. He is presently an Emeritus professor at the
University of New Orleans in
Louisiana. DeVries continues to study long-term butterfly community diversity, and speciation. His butterfly trapping methods are used widely in tropical diversity studies and conservation efforts. He also continues work on evolution of butterfly-ant symbioses. Recent honors include: in 2010, DeVries was elected one of 125 extraordinary University of Texas ex-graduates for the university's 125th anniversary; in 2012, the main-belt minor planet
89131 Phildevries was named in DeVries' honor by astronomer Bill Yeung. ==Singing caterpillars==