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Introduction and History
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What is Marine Biology? Marine biology - the study of organisms that live in the sea. Marine biology incorporates many other sciences as well such as: Geology Chemistry Physics Meteorology Zoology Oceanographers study the physical aspects of the ocean including tides, currents, waves and the chemical make-up of seawater. (non-living environment)
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Why Study Marine Biology?
1. Studying marine life forms can provide clue about early life on earth. 2. Many products come from the sea including. Medicines Food (fisheries) Clothing Agar Building material
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Why Study Marine Biology?
3. The marine environment and its habitats support recreation and tourism worldwide. 4. Marine organisms produce oxygen used by aerobic organisms, including humans.
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Why Study Marine Biology?
5. Oceans help to regulate climate. 6. Marine organisms can cause problems directly to human life or their property. 7. Humans impact the health of the oceans: Sea level rise Marine pollution Coral bleaching Depletion of fisheries
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Marine Biology History
Explorers: Vikings Phoenicians Polynesians Columbus Magellan Cook
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Migration Routes of Polynesia
Through a multi-disciplinary effort, recently enhanced by the contributions of modern Polynesians eager to experience their past, a picture is emerging of the development of a seafaring culture oriented toward oceanic exploration. The islands scattered along the north shore of New Guinea first drew these canoe people eastwards into the ocean. By 1500 B.C., these voyagers began moving east beyond New Guinea, first along the Solomon Island chain, and then to the Banks and Vanuatu Archipelagos. As the gaps between islands grew from tens of miles at the edge of the western Pacific to hundreds of miles along the way to Polynesia, and then to thousands of miles in the case of voyages to the far corners of the Polynesian triangle, these oceanic colonizers developed great double-hulled vessels capable of carrying colonists as well as all their supplies, domesticated animals, and planting materials. As the voyages became longer, they developed a highly sophisticated navigation system based on observations of the stars, the ocean swells, the flight patterns of birds and other natural signs to find their way over the open ocean. And, as they moved farther away from the biotic centers of Southeast Asia and New Guinea, finding the flora and fauna increasingly diminished, they developed a portable agricultural system, whereby the domesticated plants and animals were carried in their canoes for transplantation on the islands they found. Once they had reached the mid-ocean archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, these seafarers - the immediate ancestors of the Polynesians - were alone in the ocean, for only they had the canoes and navigational skills needed to push so far into the Pacific. The gaps between islands widen greatly in the eastern Pacific and the prevailing winds become less and less favorable for sailing to the east. Nonetheless, the archaeological evidence indicates that they sailed eastward to the Cook, Society, and Marquesas Groups, and from there crossed thousands of miles of open ocean to colonize the islands of Hawai'i in the north, Easter Island in the southeast, and New Zealand in the southwest, thus completing settlement, by around 1000 AD, of the area we know today as the Polynesian Triangle. When the Southeast Asian sailors started out on their odyssey they were not yet identifiably Polynesian. Only after many years of learning how to voyage long distances, and to survive on the high islands and atolls they found in the sea, did the ocean-oriented Polynesian culture take on its classic form. In addition to a highly developed sailing and navigational technology, that cullture included a uniquely oceanic world view and a social structure well adapted to voyaging and colonization. Polynesian societies combined a strong authority structure based on genealogical ranking that was useful for mounting long expeditions and founding island colonies. Marquesas appeared to be the starting point for voyages to Easter Island, Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand. Polynesians navigated using the sun and moon, the nighttime stars, behavior of marine organisms, various ocean properties and a stick chart.Stick charts consistently depicted regular patterns of ocean waves In addition to their more advanced navigational techniques, the early navigators used some simple facts as an aid to their navigation. The first of these was the occurrence of trade wind clouds over invisible islands over the horizon. What the navigator could see was the reflection of the island in the under surface of the cloud. This green reflection was an obvious sign to the navigator that there was an island or atoll over the horizon. The second simple navigational technique adopted by our forefathers was to follow the movements of the birds. Such birds as the frigate bird and the tern roost ashore and then feed at sea. Dawn and dusk flight paths pointed the way to land. When travelling greater distances, the early navigators steered by the stars. They directed their canoes towards a particular star in the constellation Leo and when that star moved too high and too far to the left, they followed the next star that rose from the same point on the horizon. Then the next and after that the next and so on until dawn broke. The star-compass technique is still practised over much of the Pacific. What is more impressive however is the island navigator's uncanny skill to steer by wave motion - swells reflected from islands beyond the horizons. The skilled navigator comes to recognise the profile and characteristic of particular ocean swells as he would the faces of his friends, but he judges their direction more by feel than by sight. The complex patterns produced by swell reflected and refracted among the islands are recognised by navigators throughout Oceania.
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Aristotle ( B.C.) Scientific method (observation, inductive reasoning) Described hundreds of marine species Dolphin is a mammal The earth is round Biology (spontaneous generation) Aristotle B.C Aristotle excelled at marine biology and identified 500 different species of sea life. Determined a dolphin was a mammal Aristotle became a teacher in a school on the coast of Asia Minor. He spent two years studying marine biology on Lesbos. In 342 BC, Philip II invited Aristotle to return to the Macedonian court and teach his 13-year-old son Alexander. that specific references to marine life were recorded. Aristotle identified a variety of species including crustaceans, echinoderms, mollusks, and fish. He also recognized that cetaceans are mammals, and that marine vertebrates are either oviparous (producing eggs that hatch outside the body) or viviparous (producing eggs that hatch within the body). Because he is the first to record observations on marine life, Aristotle is often referred to as the father of marine biology. Written records of significant biological observations concerning marine organisms began with the early Greek philosophers, most notably Aristotle. Aristotle ( BC) was the most famous student of Plato's. Plato considered intuition as the basis of knowledge. Aristotle, however, disagreed with his teacher and the Platonic school, and felt that accurate observation and description of nature, as well as inductive reasoning and interpretation, were the only way to advance understanding of the natural world. Thus although Aristotle made many observations that were relatively accurate, his greatest contribution to science was his approach, which was the forerunner of the modern scientific method. More remarkably, Aristotle had no real teachers, predecessors, or body of scientific knowledge to build on, - he was literally the first (of record) to begin such studies, thus earning the title of "Father of Natural History". He himself was quite aware of his position as one of the first of his kind, and also of the humble nature of these first studies, - he wrote: " I found no basis prepared; no models to copy... Mine is the first step, and therefore a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labor. It must be looked at as a first step and judged with indulgence." Aristotle made a number of important contributions to oceanography and marine biology. The second book of his Meteorology begins with what is essentially a treatise on oceanography. He regarded the earth as a sphere (contrary to the popular view at the time that the earth was circular), since things gravitated towards the center, and because of the shadow cast by the earth during eclipses. Aristotle was also the first to record speculations about the bathymetry of the various seas. He also recognized that the seas and continents are slowly changing through time, remarking that the Sea of Azov was slowly filling and would eventually become land. Aristotle also described and named 24 species of crustaceans and annelid worms, 40 species of molluscs and echinoderms, and 116 species of fish (all from the Aegean Sea). He recognized cetaceans (dolphins, whales, etc.) as mammals, and accurately described many groups of vertebrates as oviparous or viviparous.
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Cook (1700’s)- sailed twice around the world
1st European to visit Hawaii Cook James Cook was born on October 27, 1728, in Marton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire, England. He was the son of a farmer of Scottish decent. As a young teenager, Cook was apprenticed to a seafaring family. In 1755, he joined Great Britain's Royal Navy and soon proved himself an expert navigator. Just after making officer rank, Lieutenant Cook was chosen by the Royal Society of London to undertake a scientific journey to Tahiti to observe and document the planet Venus as it passed between the earth and the sun. These observations would help scientists calculate the distance of the earth from the sun. On August 25, [1768], Cook departed England aboard the Endeavour with 94 crewmen and scientists. He was carrying secret orders from the Royal Navy to be opened upon completion of his scientific mission. Cook was determined to keep his crew healthy. He insisted his men eat onions and pickled cabbage every day, and made sure that the ship kept fresh fruit and vegetables on board. He ordered his men to bathe every day, to clean their clothing, and to air out their bedding. He did not know the scientific reasons behind these measures, but he knew they worked to prevent scurvy and other diseases in his crew. On April 11, 1769, the Endeavour arrived on the shores of Tahiti, seven weeks early. After viewing the passing of Venus between the earth and sun for several weeks, Cook opened a sealed envelope with the Royal Navy's orders. He was to seek out the fabled southern continent and claim it for England. Early mapmakers in the 1570s assumed there were two major continents at each of the earth's poles. Dutch explorers searched for the southern continent in the seventeenth century. Since the continents had not yet been found, the Royal Navy trusted that Cook would find the southern one if it existed. He left Tahiti on July 13 and headed southwest. When Cook reached New Zealand on October 6, the native Maori people proved to be unfriendly and his crew was forced to fire on them. The Endeavour spent a few months exploring New Zealand and proved it was not part of the great southern continent. On April 9, [1770], Cook explored and documented the location of Australia. While sailing around this great continent, the Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef (extending 150 miles from Australia's northeast coast and the largest reef in the world) on June 11. It took a day to free the ship after the crew threw fifty tons of ship's ballast, iron cannons, firewood, and barrels overboard. Once free, the crew quickly made repairs to the badly leaking ship to keep it from sinking. After months of exploring the coastline of Australia, Cook concluded that this continent was not the great southern continent. The Endeavour made its way to Java in the East Indies in October, Once there, Cook's men became very ill with Malaria and dysentery. Despite all his efforts to keep his crew safe and healthy, they were no match for these diseases. He lost 30 men and had to sign on new crew in South Africa in order to make it back home to England. The Endeavour made it back to Dover, England, on July 13, 1771, after a three-year voyage. Cook was formally presented to his majesty, King George III following the historic journey and made a naval commander
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This image shows Alexander being lowered into the sea in a glass barrel to observe marine life (Aristotle's influence, perhaps?) From the old French prose Alexander Romance manuscript, Rouen, 1445
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Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766 – 1820)
Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766 – 1820) was a French naturalist, in particular a malacologist, remembered today for his pioneering inquiries into the existence of the giant squid Architeuthis, which was thought to be an old wives' tale, and for which he was long dismissed. He was inspired by a description from 1783 of an eight-metre long tentacle found in the mouth of a sperm whale. Dénys de Montfort was author of Conchyliologie systématique, et classification méthodique de coquilles (2 vols., Paris ) and of Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (2 vols., Paris ) published as an addendum to the comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle générale et particulière.
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Alfred Russel Wallace 1823 - 1913
Alfred Russel Wallace ( ), English naturalist, evolutionist, geographer, anthropologist, and social critic and theorist, was born 8 January 1823 at Usk, Gwent (formerly, and at the time of Wallace's birth, Monmouthshire). He was the third of four sons and eighth of nine children of Thomas Vere Wallace and Mary Anne Greenell, a middle-class English couple of modest means. The older Wallace was of Scottish descent (reputedly, of a line leading back to the famous William Wallace of medieval times); the Greenells were a relatively unremarkable but respectable English family that had lived in the area for generations. Thomas Wallace had trained for the law (and actually was sworn in as an attorney in 1792) but never practiced, income from inherited property securing him a life of leisure for the first fifteen years of his adulthood. With his marriage in 1807 things quickly changed, however, and he was forced into the first of what would turn out to be a long series of relatively unsuccessful ventures, including the publication of a literary magazine. Young Alfred's childhood was a happy one, but at times difficult for lack of money. Four of his five older sisters did not live beyond the age of twenty-two, and Wallace himself was not always in the best of health. He found the grammar school he attended in Hertford rather tedious, but for a time was privy to plenty of good reading materials, his father being a town librarian for some years. About 1835 the elder Wallace was swindled out of his remaining property and the family fell on really hard times; young Wallace was forced to withdraw from school around Christmas 1836 and was sent to London to room with his older brother John. The ensuing several month experience was critical to his future intellectual development, as there he first came into contact with supporters of the utopian socialist Robert Owen. In his autobiography My Life (S729) he recollects that he even once heard Owen himself speak; from that point on he would describe himself in disciple terms. By mid 1837 he had left London to join the eldest brother, William, in Bedfordshire. William owned a surveying business, and Wallace was to learn the trade. In 1839 he was temporarily apprenticed to a watchmaker, but by the end of the year he was again working with William, now based in Hereford. Over the next several years he picked up a number of trades-related skills and knowledge, particularly in drafting and map-making, geometry and trigonometry, building design and construction, mechanics, and agricultural chemistry. Moreover, he discovered that he really enjoyed the outdoor work involved in surveying. Soon he was starting to take an interest in the natural history of his surroundings, especially its botany, geology, and astronomy. While working in the area of the Hereford town of Kington in 1841 he became associated with the newly-formed Mechanic's Institution there; some months later, after moving over to the Welsh town of Neath, he began attending lectures given by the members of that area's various scientific societies. He also involved himself with the Neath Mechanics Institute, eventually giving his own lectures there on various technical and natural history subjects. The early 1840s also witnessed his first writing efforts: an essay (S1a) on the disposition of mechanics institutes written about 1841 found its way into a history of Kington published in 1845; two of his other essays from this early period (S1 and S623) are discussed in his 1905 autobiography My Life (S729). In late 1843 a slow work period forced William Wallace to let his brother go. Alfred decided to apply for an open position at the Collegiate School in Leicester, where he was hired on as a master to teach drafting, surveying, English, and arithmetic. Now commenced another period central to his future path. Collegiate School had a good library, and there he was able to find and digest several important works on natural history and systematics; moreover, sometime during the year 1844 he made the acquaintance of another young amateur naturalist, Henry Walter Bates. Bates, though two years younger than Wallace, was already an accomplished entomologist, and his collections and collecting activities soon captured Wallace's interest. Around the same time Wallace saw his first demonstration of the practice of mesmerism, then dismissed by most as illusion or trickery. On investigating, however, he found he could personally reproduce many of the effects he had seen exhibited on stage, and learned his "first great lesson in the inquiry into these obscure fields of knowledge, never to accept the disbelief of great men, or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility, as of any weight when opposed to the repeated observation of facts by other men admittedly sane and honest" (S478). In February of 1845 his brother William died unexpectedly and Wallace quit his teaching job at Leicester to return to surveying, now going through a boom period. But he soon found that running the business, even with the help of his brother John, involved responsibilities (such as fee collection) that he hated. He still had enough spare time, however, to continue with his natural history-related activities, and was even made a curator of the Neath Philosophical and Literary Institute's museum. He also kept up a correspondence with his friend Bates. A new book by William H. Edwards entitled A Voyage Up the River Amazon suggested a way out of his situation: he would turn professional and launch a self-sustaining natural history collecting expedition to South America. Bates was enlisted (undoubtedly with little effort), and the two young men (at the time Wallace was 25 and Bates 23) left for Pará (now called Belém), at the mouth of the Amazon, on 25 April 1848. Travels in the Amazon and Malay Archipelago ( ) On 28 May 1848 Wallace and Bates disembarked at Pará and began to organize their operations. At first they worked as a team, but in March 1850 or perhaps as much as eighteen months earlier they split up (for reasons that have never been clarified). Wallace centered his activities in the middle Amazon and Rio Negro regions; Bates would remain in Amazonian South America eleven years, securing his permanent reputation as a leading naturalist and entomologist, and contributing significantly to the early development of the theory of natural selection through his elucidation of the concept of mimetic resemblance--"Batesian mimicry"--and various writings on biogeography. Wallace managed to ascend the Rio Negro system further than anyone else had to that point, and drafted a map of the Rio Negro region that proved accurate enough to become the standard for many years (see S11). Apart from playing the role of collector and explorer, Wallace had an overriding reason for coming to the Amazon: to investigate the causes of organic evolution. His contacts with the Owenists had left him with an early interest in social/societal evolution, an interest that had extended itself in the direction of natural science with his mid-1840s readings of two crucial works: Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, and Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Lyell's work had become the bible of uniformitarianism, and instilled in Wallace an appreciation of how long-term change could be effected through the operation of slow, ongoing processes. Vestiges was an early, popular, effort to examine the notion of biological evolution; it was a bit short on its appreciation of mechanism but argued pursuasively against both Creationism and Lamarckism. Wallace was apparently an instant convert to the feature arguments of each work, and very quickly recognized how he might go about demonstrating that evolution did in fact take place: by tracing out, over time and space, the geographical/geological records of individual phylogenies. He soon focused on two particular elements of this study: (1) the way geography limited or facilitated the extension of species range, and (2) how ecological station seemed to influence the shaping of adaptations more than did closeness of affinity with other forms. His investigation of these subjects included efforts to come to grips with the region's ornithology, entomology, primatology, ichthyology, botany, and physical geography, but in the end he was unable to come to any conclusion about the actual mechanism of evolutionary change. He also spent much time studying the ways of the native peoples he worked among, including collecting vocabularies of many of their languages (S714). By early 1852 Wallace was in ill health and in no condition to proceed any further. He decided to quit South America, and began the long trip back down the Rio Negro and Amazon to Pará. When he finally reached the town on the 2nd of July, he found that his younger brother Herbert had died. Herbert had been working in the area since 1849, but in 1851 tried to return to England from Pará, where he caught yellow fever. Moreover, and further to Wallace's dismay, most of the collections from the preceding two years he had been forwarding down the Amazon had been delayed at the dock through a misunderstanding; he would therefore have to secure passage for these as well as himself. Within a few days he had been successful in so doing, and soon set out for England. Unfortunately, on the 6th of August the brig on which he was sailing caught fire and sank, taking almost all of his possessions--including some live animals--along with it. For ten days Wallace and his comrades struggled to survive in a pair of badly leaking lifeboats, then were sighted and picked up by a passing cargo ship also making its way back to England. As luck would have it this vessel was also old and slow, and itself nearly foundered when hit by a series of storms. In all, Wallace's ocean crossing took eighty days. When Wallace stepped back on English soil on 1 October 1852, he was faced with some decisions. His collections had been insured, but only to an extent buying him some time. He was now twenty-nine and reasonably well-known as a travelling naturalist, but he had not been able to come up with the key to the mystery of organic change. Further, he now had no collections he could study at his leisure that might help him do so. For eighteen months his activities were mixed: a vacation in Switzerland, attending professional meetings and delivering papers, and, finally, the production of two books: Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses (S713) and A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (S714). These made a slight but generally positive impression; the first was an ethnobotanical study based in part on drawings he had managed to save from the ship's fire; the second, a pleasant but not terribly profound account of his four years' work and travels. With no other prospects immediately apparent, Wallace decided to carry on with his collecting activities. He chose the Indonesian Archipelago for his next base of operations, using his record of accomplishments to that point to secure a grant from the Royal Geographical Society covering his passage to what was referred to in those days as "the Malay Archipelago." He arrived in Singapore on 20 April 1854, to begin what would turn out to be the defining period of his life. Wallace's name is now inextricably linked with his travels in the Indonesian region. He spent nearly eight full years there; during that period he undertook about seventy different expeditions resulting in a combined total of around 14,000 miles of travel. He visited every important island in the archipelago at least once, and several on multiple occasions. His collecting efforts produced the astonishing total of 125,660 specimens, including more than a thousand species new to science. The volume he later wrote describing his work and experiences there, The Malay Archipelago (S715), is the most celebrated of all writings on Indonesia, and ranks with a small handful of other works as one of the nineteenth century's best scientific travel books. Highlights of his adventures there include his study and capture of birds-of-paradise and orangutans, his many dealings with native peoples, and his residence on New Guinea (he was one of the very first Europeans to live there for any extended period). Beyond his travel and collecting activities, Wallace's time in the Malay Archipelago was marked, of course, by the 1858 event that would assure his place in history. Three years earlier he had still been cogitating on the causes of organic evolution when an article by another naturalist prompted him to write and publish the essay 'On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species' (S20), a theoretical work that all but stated outright Wallace's belief in evolution. The paper was seen by Lyell, who thought highly of it and brought it to Darwin's attention. Darwin, however, took relatively little notice. Now that he had a provisional model of the relation of biogeography to organic change, Wallace quickly applied the related concepts in two further studies, published in 1856 and 1857 (S26 & S38). In February of 1858, while suffering from an attack of malaria in the Moluccas (it is not fully certain which island he was actually on, though either Gilolo or Ternate seems the likely candidate), Wallace suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, connected the ideas of Thomas Malthus on the limits to population growth to a mechanism that might ensure long-term organic change. This was the concept of the "survival of the fittest," in which those individual organisms that are best adapted to their local surroundings are seen to have a better chance of surviving, and thus of differentially passing along their traits to progeny. Excited over his discovery, Wallace penned an essay on the subject as soon as he was well enough to do so, and sent it off to Darwin. He had begun a correspondence with Darwin two years earlier and knew that he was generally interested in "the species question"; perhaps Darwin would be kind enough to bring the work, titled 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type,' (S43) to the attention of Lyell? Darwin was in fact willing to do so, but not for any reasons Wallace had anticipated. Darwin, as the now well-known story goes, had been entertaining very similar ideas for going on twenty years, and now a threat to his priority on the subject loomed. He contacted Lyell to plead for advice on how to meet what just about anyone would have to admit was a very awkward situation. Lyell and Joseph Hooker, a prominent botanist and another of Darwin's close friends, decided to present Wallace's essay, along with some unpublished fragments from Darwin's writings on the subject, to the next meeting of the Linnean Society. This took place on 1 July 1858, without obtaining Wallace's permission first (he was contacted only after the fact). Whatever one thinks about Wallace's treatment in this matter, the events of summer 1858 did ensure that the world wouldn't have to wait any longer for its introduction to the concept of natural selection. Darwin had been working on a much larger tome on the subject that was still many years away from completion (and in fact never was completed); Wallace's bombshell had the immediate effect of forcing him to get together a more compact, readable, and, ultimately, probably more successful work. On the Origin of Species was published less than eighteen months later, in November of And, although Darwin would overshadow Wallace from that point on, Wallace's role in the affair was well enough known to insiders, at least, to ensure his future entry into the highest ranks of scientific dialogue. It should in all fairness to Darwin be noted that Wallace took full advantage of this opportunity, an opportunity he might not otherwise have received. Wallace's discovery of natural selection occurred almost at the midpoint of his stay in the Malay Archipelago. He was to remain there four more years, continuing his agenda of systematically exploring and recording the circumstances of its faunas, floras, and peoples. By the end of his trip (and for the rest of his life) he was known as the greatest living authority on the region. He was especially known for his studies on its zoogeography, including his discovery and description of the faunal discontinuity that now bears his name. "Wallace's Line," extending between the islands of Bali and Lombok and Borneo and Sulawesi, marks the limits of eastern extent of many Asian animal forms and, conversely, the limits of western extent of many Australasian forms. Wallace the Evolving Polymath ( ) Wallace left the Malay Archipelago in February of 1862 and returned to England on 1 April. His collecting activities had earned him a sizable nest egg with which he hoped he could retire to a quiet life as a country gentleman. First, however, there was the matter of coming to grips with the implications of his vast personal collection of specimens. For the next three years he immersed himself in them, producing a string of systematic revisions (mainly of birds and insects) and several interpretative works. Over that period (to the end of 1865) he presented at least sixteen papers at professional meetings, to the British Association, and Entomological, Zoological, Linnean, Anthropological and Geographical Societies. He soon met nearly every important English naturalist, and began to count many as friends. In certain respects, the period 1862 through 1865 also represented a rather difficult time for Wallace. Eager to marry and settle down, he was rebuffed by one woman before wedding the eighteen year old daughter of a botanist friend in Although one of their three children would die only a few years later, their marriage was by all accounts a happy one: his wife Annie proved an excellent companion, and was well enough educated and sufficiently interested to help him from time to time with his work. Further, both Wallaces loved gardening, and spent many hours together pursuing this recreation. The real crisis for Wallace in the years after his return to England revolved, however, around his relation to the theory of natural selection. Although Wallace was known as a co-originator of the natural selection concept, the premature reading of the Ternate essay and Darwin's subsequent publication of On the Origin of Species led everyone to believe he was a full supporter of Darwinian doctrines. Subsequent events would prove he was not. We unfortunately do not know whether Wallace felt at the time that his 1858 model of natural selection could be extended to explain the origin and/or development of humankind's higher mental and moral qualities. Surprisingly, he wrote not another word about natural selection (at least, in the sense of doing more than just mentioning it) until late 1863 (the classic analysis 'Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, and on the Origin of Species,' S83). In 1864 he presented a milestone paper on the evolution of human races to the Anthropological Society: 'The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced From the Theory of "Natural Selection"' (S93). In this work Wallace sought to reconcile the positions of the monogenists and polygenists on human origins through an application of the general Darwinian model. But by 1865 at the latest (and possibly going back many years), he had been experiencing some doubt as to whether materialistic models, including Darwinism, could account for humankind's higher attributes. He began investigating the philosophy and manifestations of spiritualism, most likely (in my opinion) in an effort to complete what he had started in The result was a wholly new evolutionary synthesis, one in which a material process (natural selection) was understood to rule at the biological level, while a spiritual one (as described through spiritualism) operated at the level of consciousness. This overall approach was later taken up by the theosophists (Madame Blavatsky et al.), who based most of their more esoteric teachings (including, for example, theories of cyclic reincarnation) on ancient religious and literary texts, but who also acknowledged a role for natural selection in producing a Darwinian kind of material phylogenesis. (Wallace himself, however, would never take much interest in theosophy, considering it much too abstruse.) Wallace's conversion to spiritualism in mid-1866 took many of his colleagues by surprise (Hooker would write in disbelief "that such a man should be a spiritualist is more wonderful than all the movements of all the planets"). Wallace spent a few years urging them to look into the matter in more detail, but few followed his lead. He would remain a spiritualist the rest of his days, never recounting his belief, and publishing some one hundred writings on the subject. It is in fact generally thought that Wallace's thinking regarding the application of Darwinian concepts to the development of humankind's higher attributes changed around 1865 in response to this apparent new influence in his life; I personally feel this is a mis-reading of the situation, and that the apparent "change" in his position simply represented a solidification of an already-existing, but not yet formally stated, evolutionary model. Whatever one believes about the influences on Wallace's thoughts during this period, there can be no disagreement as to the sudden broadening of his attention that followed soon thereafter. In 1865 he produced his first published writing on politics (S110); in 1866 writings on geodesy (S115 & S116); in 1867 his first of many treatments of glacial features (S124); and in 1869 the first of several essays on museum organization (S143). Primarily, however, he was gaining recognition as one of Darwin's two main (the other being Thomas Huxley) "right-hand men." His most important 1860s works in that direction include S83, S93, S96, S121, S134, S136, S139, S140, S146, and S155. His reputation as a naturalist soon extended itself to the popular arena with the publication of his hugely successful The Malay Archipelago (S715) in early 1869, and the essay collection Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (S716) a year later. In the decade that followed, Wallace published over 150 works, including essays, letters, reviews, book notices, and monographs. His scientific writings would focus on natural selection, geographical distribution, and glaciology, and include three classic books: The Geographical Distribution of Animals (S718) in 1876, Tropical Nature, and Other Essays (S719) in 1878, and Island Life (S721) in Each work is still frequently referred to today: S718, for its formalization of the faunal region concept and treatment of zoogeographical methodology; S719, for its attention to the causes and characteristics of tropical floras and faunas (including its discussion of the concept of latitudinal diversity gradients); and S721, for its systemization of island types and biotas, and relation of glaciation processes to the known characteristics of geographical distribution of plants and animals. In Wallace's work in biology and anthropology, further departures from Darwinian thinking were evident. He continued to argue against some of Darwin's positions on human evolution, and in addition the latter's approach to sexual selection and several biogeographic matters. His 1870s writings were also characterized by an increased attention to social issues. In 1870 he spoke out against government aid to science (S157 & S158); in 1873 he produced essays on the Church of England (S225), free trade principles (S231), and the abolishment of trusts (S236); in 1878 he wrote on a suburban forest management issue (S292); and in 1879, again on free trade (S306, S310 & S312). Meanwhile, personal problems were creating a considerable distraction. Most of the profits accrued from his Malay collections were badly invested, and lost. He was not well suited for most kinds of permanent positions, and despite applying for a number of them never succeeded in landing one. He took on odd jobs (editing other naturalists' manuscripts, correcting state-administered examinations, giving lectures, etc.) to help make ends meet, and moved progressively further and further from London to minimize costs and find more suitable living quarters. In 1870 Wallace took up a 500.-pound challenge from a flat-earther to produce a proof that the earth was not flat; he won the challenge with a neatly conceived demonstration but, on a technicality, not a penny of the wager, and was seriously harassed by the loser for over ten years. Eventually his financial situation degenerated far enough to cause a friend to intervene; in 1881, with help from Darwin (see Colp 1992), the government was convinced to grant him an annual civil list pension of 200. pounds for his services to science. It was not enough to live on, but it helped. Wallace the Social Radical and "Grand Old Man of Science" ( ) With the completion of his great works on biogeography, Wallace turned in earnest to social issues in the 1880s. He had been interested for many years in the problems associated with land tenure, and in 1870, at the special invitation of John Stuart Mill, had even become peripherally involved with the latter's Land Tenure Reform Association. But in early 1881, following the publication of his 'How to Nationalize the Land' (S329), he fully committed himself to the debate by helping start the Land Nationalisation Society. He also became its first President, holding that position until his death, over thirty years later (though after 1895 his participation in the organization's work was more inspirational than actual). Wallace's two most important writings on land were his Land Nationalisation (S722), published in 1882, and 1883's 'The "Why" and the "How" of Land Nationalisation' (S365). In these he argued that the State should, over the long-term, buy out large land holdings and then institute an elaborate rent system based on a combination of location-specific and value-added-by-renter considerations. Wallace's writings on land nationalization include many ideas in advance of their time, including suggestions for the legislated protection of rural lands and historical monuments, the construction of greenbelts and parks, and arguments for suburban and rural re-population and organization. In the early 1880s he also became interested in the anti-vaccination movement. As one of its most powerful spokespersons he would produce a series of impassioned writings (S374, S420, S536 & S616) that featured statistical epidemiological arguments, a great novelty for its time. Wallace also took up the causes of the labor movement. He was an early proponent of overtime pay rates, but was against strikes: instead, he argued, employees should donate a portion of their pay to funds that could later be used to effect company buy-outs. Eventually he came around to endorsing socialism, but only as late as 1890, on his reading of the American Edward Bellamy's best-selling utopian novel Looking Backward. As mentioned earlier, Wallace had since his early teen years had a genuine love for the work of Robert Owen, but had never quite believed in the large-scale practicality of Owen's approach. Neither had he been quite sure about its possible incursion on individual rights and freedoms. Looking Backward changed his mind on both issues. From 1890 on, Wallace would view socialism as a means whereby the average person might obtain a certain basic and acceptable standard of living; freedom from worrying over basics would then (in theory) allow a re-directioning of attention toward various means of moral/ethical self-improvement (including spiritualism). His motto (borrowed from the English sociologist and writer Benjamin Kidd) would become "Equality of opportunity!", a plea for social justice. The preceding list by no means exhausts the range of non-natural science-related subjects that Wallace at one time or another addressed. For example, he was an early supporter of women's suffrage, and was much admired by the members of the women's movement for his unqualified stand on the matter. He also came down heavily on many occasions on societal and governmental responses to eugenics, poverty, militarism, imperialism, and institutional punishment. On several occasions (S552, S553, S556 & S557) he wrote on the advantages of implementing a paper money standard; his efforts were later recognized by twentieth century economists interested in currency stabilization theory (the renowned American economist Irving Fisher even dedicated a book to him!). He sparred with the legal system at times, suggesting changes in the means of dealing with inherited wealth and trusts. He wrote two essays (S491 & S635) on how to re-establish confidence in the House of Lords, and one on how to revitalize the Church of England (S225). Many of the more conservative of the social and institutional elite came to wince at the mere mention of his name. Although Wallace's travels as a self-supporting naturalist/explorer had ended with his return to England in 1862, he did not lead an entirely sedentary life his remaining years. As already mentioned, he began to move away from London as early as the 1860s; by 1881 he was in Godalming, in 1889, Parkstone, and then, finally, Broadstone (near Wimborne, Dorset, and the English Channel) in For many years (until 1890) he travelled around the better part of England giving lectures and attending meetings, and even to Scotland and Ireland. He and his wife also spent several vacations and "botanizing excursions" in locations ranging from Wales and the Lake Country to Switzerland. In 1896 he gave an invited lecture on progress in the nineteenth century in the town of Davos in the latter country. But the main adventure of his post-Malay Archipelago life was a ten-month lecture tour to the United States and Canada in 1886 and 1887. In late 1885 Wallace was invited to give a series of lectures on Darwinism at the Lowell Institute in Massachusetts. Once this obligation was met he would be free to arrange such other lectures as he might wish. For six months in late 1886 and early 1887 he stayed mainly in the vicinities of Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., where he met countless individuals of note, up to and including President Cleveland. In early April of 1887 he set out across the country, reaching California in late May of that year. There he was reunited with his older brother John, who he hadn't seen for nearly forty years. For several weeks he vacationed and lectured; one of his presentations was a talk on spiritualism entitled 'If a Man Die, Shall He Live Again?' (S398)--probably the single most successful lecture he ever gave. Significant events from his stay in the San Francisco area included tours of nearby redwood groves (in the company of the eminent naturalist John Muir), Yosemite Valley, and the future site of Stanford University (with Leland Stanford himself, with whom he had become intimate some months earlier in Washington, D.C.). In early July he left California to return eastward, ultimately back to England. The American tour became the inspiration for Wallace's next major book, in Titled Darwinism (S724), it consisted largely of the topics he had lectured on, presented one chapter at a time. It did very well, and remains one of his most frequently cited works. Darwinism, while perhaps the highpoint of his later scientific work, was nevertheless only a very small part of it. Although social studies were absorbing more and more of his attention throughout the 1880s and 1890s, he was still left with plenty of time to crank out a steady stream of writings on more scientific subjects. During the 1890s alone he again published a total of over 150 works, dozens of these dealing with evolutionary, biogeographic, and physical geography subjects. By the turn of the century, Wallace was very probably Britain's best known naturalist. By the end of his life, moreover, he may well have owned (based on evidence gleaned from contemporary sources) one of the world's most recognized names. While simultaneously continuing to publish scores of short works, between the years 1898 and mostly during his ninth decade--he managed to turn out (i.e., as author and/or editor) well over four thousand pages of monographic writings! His final two books were published in the year of his death, He remained active into his ninety-first year but slowly weakened in his final months. He died in his sleep at Broadstone on 7 November 1913; three days later his remains were buried nearby. On 1 November 1915 a medallion bearing his name was placed in Westminster Abbey. Despite Wallace's radical associations and links with spiritualism, he was well honored during his lifetime (and he most likely would have been even more so had he not made it clear early on that he was not particularly interested in receiving honoraria). He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Dublin in 1882 and Oxford University in 1889, and important medals from the Royal Society in 1868, 1890 and 1908, the Société de Geographie in 1870, and the Linnean Society in 1892 and He even received the Order of Merit from the Crown in quite an honor for such an anti-establishment radical. He became a (reluctant) member of the Royal Society in 1893, and at one time or another had professional affiliations with the Royal Geographical Society, Linnean Society, Zoological Society, Royal Entomological Society, Ethnological Society (though apparently not as a member), British Association for the Advancement of Science, Society for Psychical Research, Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Ethological Society (London), British Ornithologists' Union, Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, British National Association of Spiritualists, Land Nationalisation Society, Anti-Vaccination League, and several lesser organizations. Physical descriptions of Wallace dwell on his height (as a young man he was six feet one inch tall), long beard (maintained from his days in the Malay Archipelago on), and snow-white hair (starting in his fifties). He had a fundamentally lean build, and as the years passed came to walk with a bit of a stoop. His eyesight was not strong, with the result that his sparkling blue eyes were framed by spectacles for most of his life. He experienced various illnesses and ailments throughout his life, none of which individually seems to have had any great negative effect on his productivity. As a person Wallace was decent to a fault; he possessed an apparently infinite tolerance for the weaknesses of others (and was surely victimized on a number of occasions as a result), but he was also known for not suffering fools gladly. He thrived on public debate, but was personally modest, shy, and self-effacing. Still, by all accounts he was good company when at ease, and was much in demand as a public speaker. He also had a solid reputation as a writer and reviewer, and for all his "isms" was generally regarded by his peers as one of the period's greatest scientific reasoners.
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Voyage of the HMS Beagle
The primary mission of the Beagle was to map the coastline of southern South America and take oceanographic measurements (currents, bathymetry, etc) as well. Darwin's job as ship's naturalist was to observe everything, write it all down and collect as many specimens as possible. It was his job to record the weather, geological features, plants, animals, fossils, rocks, minerals, indigenous people and anything else that he saw. Specimens had to be packed and labeled very carefully. In preparing for the voyage, Darwin made a list of things that he would need, including 12 new shirts and other clothing; slippers; light walking shoes; a folding, portable dissecting microscope; a geological compass; a case of pistols and a rifle; a Spanish-English dictionary; a book on taxidermy; reading material (Humboldt and Milton); his favorite geology text, Lyell's Principles of Geology; a Bible; a pair of binoculars; a magnifying glass; and jars of "Spirit" (probably alcohol) for preserving specimens. (I wonder what his dad thought of that list...Thanks, Dad!) Like any expedition, there were space limitations. The Beagle was not an exceptionally large vessel by any means. Measuring only ninety feet in length, she carried a crew of 74 people, "including the Captain, three officers, the crew, a doctor, an artist, and the naturalist. Darwin shared the poop cabin (at the back of the ship) with two officers. Their space was so cramped that Darwin had to remove a drawer each night so that he would have room for his feet." David Likely tells the story of how the ship's Captain Robert Fitzroy almost refused to let Darwin sail because his nose did not appear to be that of a man with character. Darwin had to get testimonials that he was suitable for dining at the Captain's dinner table. Apparently, Darwin and the Captain, a fundamentalist Christian, didn't always see eye to eye (Darwin was once banned from the dinner table for several days), which has led some to speculate that this relationship even further hardened Darwin against religion. After more than two months delay (the ship was to leave October 24, 1831), the ship attempted a departure on December 10 but ran into bad weather. Finally, on December 27 at 2:00 pm, Darwin and the Beagle left Plymouth harbor on what was to become most revolutionary oceanographic expedition of our time. Immediately upon sailing, Darwin's enthusiasm for the voyage was severely dampened by sea-sickness. He writes: "...the misery I endured from sea sickness is far beyond what I ever guessed at. The real misery only begins when you are so exhausted that a little exertion makes a feeling faintness come on -- I found that nothing but lying in my hammock did any good. Three and a half weeks later, on January , they reached the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of south Africa. It was here that Darwin's innate ability to observe in great detail and think "large" began to assert itself. In St. Jago, he correctly surmised the African origins of dust that created the hazy atmosphere of the islands, he wrote about "reckless destruction" of the forests and offered the following observations on octopus: I was much interested by watching the habits of an Octopus, or cuttle-fish. By means of their long arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and, when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. These animals escape detection by a very extraordinary, chameleon-like power of changing their color. They appear to vary their tints according to the nature of the ground over which they pass. These changes were affected in such a manner that clouds, varying in tint were continually passing over the body. Any part, being subjected to a slight shock, became almost black. While not the first to observe cephalopod chromatophores, the detail with which he describes them belies his fascination with nature. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which he carried out his observations and collections can be found in his diary entries upon exploring South America: I have been wandering by myself in the Brazilian forest: amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking; the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory, the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end...To a person fond of Natural History such a day brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience" [Barlow 1933: 39-40]. And the next day, "I can only add rapture s to the former raptures" [Barlow 1933: 40].[Journal of Syms Covington, Darwin's assistant] Overtaken with such "treasures", Darwin felt that he needed an assistant. He got permission to hire Syms Covington, the ship's "fiddler and boy to the poop cabin" [where the officers lived], who helped with the time-consuming task of cataloguing and shipping Darwin's specimens. Covington kept his own journal [Journal of Syms Covington] which offers interesting reading about Darwin and his relationship with others on board. Darwin (1831): Subsidence theory of coral reef formation (atolls) & origin of species
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Darwin’s Theory of Coral Atoll Formation: Subsidence Theory
Fringing Reef- boarders coastline closely Island subsides Barrier Reef- separated from land by a lagoon Atoll- coral ring with central lagoon lagoon is a shallow area with a sandy floor, patch reefs, and patches of seagrass
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Fringing Reef- Tahiti
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Australia- Great Barrier Reef
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Kaneohe Bay Barrier Reef Patch Reef Fringing Reef
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Belize- Blue Hole Atoll
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Midway Atoll Kure Atoll (28° 25' N - 178° 20' W) Pearl & Hermes Atoll
20
Voyage of the HMS Challenger (1872-1876)
collected thousands of biological and sea bottom samples traveled in every ocean except arctic cruise directed by Charles Wyville Thompson 362 stations, 715 new genera, 5000 new species discovered Mariana Trench and Mindarniad (34,000 ft deep) On 21 December 1872 the 2306 ton steam assisted corvette HMS Challenger sailed from Portsmouth on a 3-year voyage of marine exploration which laid the foundations of almost every branch of oceanography as we know it today. Her naval complement was headed by Captain G S Nares, an experienced survey officer, while the Director of her scientific staff was Charles Wyville Thomson, Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh. These two men were responsible for an extremely wide-ranging programme of research into the physical and biological characteristics of the deep sea, for when the Challenger sailed the scientific investigation of the open oceans had hardly begun and many basic questions were still unanswered. What was the nature of the animal life in the very greatest depths? Indeed, did animals exist at all over wide areas of the sea bed? (Only a few years previously it had been widely assumed that life was untenable in the perpetual darkness, enormous pressures and intense cold of the abyssal depths.) What was the shape of the bottom of the great ocean basins, the composition of the bottom sediments and their source? And what of the sea water itself? Would a knowledge of its temperature variation with depth as well as its specific gravity give clues to the nature and causes of the complex system of sub-surface currents of which scientists were becoming aware? To enable her to probe into these and many other problems, Challengers guns had been removed, her spars reduced, and laboratories, extra cabins and a special dredging platform installed. She was loaded with thousands of specimen jars, alcohol for preservation, microscopes and chemical apparatus, trawls and dredges, thermometers and water sampling bottles, sounding leads and devices to collect sediment from the deep sea bed and great lengths of rope with which to suspend the equipment into the ocean depths. In all she was supplied with the staggering total of 181 miles of best Italian hemp for sounding, trawling and dredging. During the mile voyage the naval staff was responsible for taking a wide variety of magnetic and meteorological observations, and for the actual working of the sampling gears at the 354 official stations where the vessel stopped to make detailed studies. The work of the scientists, or 'philosophers' as they were nicknamed aboard, began with the arrival of the samples on deck. The water samples were examined by the chemist, John Young Buchanan, while the contents of the nets and dredges were the responsibility of Wyville Thomson and his three young naturalist assistants. All of the naturalists were involved in the documentation of the thousands of samples and their preparation for dispatch back home, but they also had their own particular research interests. H N Moseley, for instance, took particular interest in the corals and sea squirts, the young German, Rudolf von Willemoes Suhm, was mainly concerned with the crustaceans, while John Murray dealt with the pelagic organisms and the ocean deposits. The final member of the civilian staff, the Swiss J. J. Wild, acted as secretary to Wyville Thomson and artist to the expedition. The voyage was an orderly and unhurried affair, with the ship proceeding mainly under sail at the somewhat matronly rate of about 100 miles a day, generally using her engine only to maintain position when she stopped to work a station every two or three days. For the period, the expedition was also a very healthy one, for only 10 fatalities occurred amongst the total complement of 243 during the whole voyage. One of these was Willemoes Suhm's tragic death from erysipelas while the ship was in the Pacific. But they lost a further 61 ratings through desertion, evidently caused in part by a desire for a cheap passage to Australia as well as by the arduous and tedious routine of the sounding and dredging operations which often took many hours. The ratings were not the only ones affected, for many of the officers became discontented with their lot long before the voyage was over, and even amongst the scientists only Wyville Thomson seems to have retained his enthusiasm to the end. Yet the expedition was not all tedium, for of the 1281 days spent away from home, 568 were spent in harbours in all quarters of the world. During these shore breaks the officers and scientists made extensive zoological, geological and ethnological collections and socialised with all manner of 'locals' ranging from the King of Portugal to recently cannibalistic Fijian natives! By the time the ship returned to Spithead in May 1876, the expedition had already provided answers to some of the significant oceanographic questions which had been posed at the outset. There was now a much clearer idea of the form of the great ocean basins down to the greatest depth sounded at 4475 fathoms, including the important discovery of a submarine ridge running the length of the Atlantic Ocean. The varying types of sea-bed samples had been classified and it had been conclusively demonstrated that the deep-sea oozes were made up of the skeletons of tiny organisms which lived in the upper layers of the sea rather than on the bottom, a subject which had caused considerable controversy during the decade before the Challenger sailed. Ample evidence had been obtained of the existence of a rich and varied fauna in the very deepest regions, although there was no evidence that the ocean depths were occupied by 'living fossils' as some biologists had expected. These results were apparent from the relatively cursory investigations which had been carried out on board, but the detailed examination of the massive collections of animals and plants, water and sea-bed samples, and of the vast quantities of numerical data had still to be accomplished. The mammoth task of organising the distribution of the material to the scientists who were to work on it and the publication of the results initially fell to Wyville Thomson. This involved him in a series of acrimonious exchanges with many individuals and institutions, including the Trustees of the British Museum who demanded that the specimens should go directly to the national collection instead of being separately distributed from an office in Edinburgh as Wyville Thomson wished. With the aid of the Royal Society Thomson eventually won this tussle, but the strain of the responsibility of establishing a style for the publication of the official reports with opposition from those who did not understand the requirements for accurate scientific investigations and illustrations, as well as the rigid accountability forced upon him, proved too much for his highly strung but unmethodical nature. He broke down first in 1879, and in 1881 when the initial five year grant from the Treasury came to an end he collapsed, resigned his professorship, and took to his bed to die in The reins were taken up by John Murray under whose forceful leadership the publication of the results was finally completed in 1895, almost a quarter of a century after the ship set sail. The fifty thick royal quarto tomes of the report, containing pages, were written by an international galaxy of scientists and many of these reports still form a starting point for specialist studies in oceanography. Similarly, many of the original samples on which the reports were based, including nearly 4000 new species of animals taken by the trawls and dredges, are still referred to by scientists from a11 over the world. The reports were the tangible evidence of the achievements of the Challenger venture, but perhaps of much greater importance in the long term was the co-operation between scientists of many countries, inspired by Wyville Thomson's leadership, which set the young science of oceanography on the path to becoming the truly international discipline that it is today. Postscript HMS Challenger's foray into oceanography interrupted an otherwise unremarkable career. In 1862 she had taken part in operations against Mexico, including the occupation of Vera Cruz, but otherwise the only action which she saw seems to have been a punitive operation in 1866 against some Fijian natives to avenge the murder of a missionary and some of his dependents. After her three years of glory, her fate was even more ignominious. Commissioned as a Coast Guard and Dril1 ship of Naval Reserves at Harwich in July 1876, she was finally paid off at Chatham in She remained in reserve until 1883, when she was converted into a receiving hulk in the River Medway, where she stayed until she was finally broken up for her copper bottom in Despite the great excitement which surrounded her middle years, virtually nothing, apart from her figurehead, now remains. This is on display in the foyer of Southampton Oceanography Centre.
21
Voyage of the HMS Challenger (1872-1876)
Deep sea Collections During the mile voyage the naval staff was responsible for taking a wide variety of magnetic and meteorological observations, and for the actual working of the sampling gears at the 354 official stations where the vessel stopped to make detailed studies. The work of the scientists, or 'philosophers' as they were nicknamed aboard, began with the arrival of the samples on deck. The water samples were examined by the chemist, John Young Buchanan, while the contents of the nets and dredges were the responsibility of Wyville Thomson and his three young naturalist assistants. All of the naturalists were involved in the documentation of the thousands of samples and their preparation for dispatch back home, but they also had their own particular research interests. H N Moseley, for instance, took particular interest in the corals and sea squirts, the young German, Rudolf von Willemoes Suhm, was mainly concerned with the crustaceans, while John Murray dealt with the pelagic organisms and the ocean deposits. The final member of the civilian staff, the Swiss J. J. Wild, acted as secretary to Wyville Thomson and artist to the expedition. The voyage was an orderly and unhurried affair, with the ship proceeding mainly under sail at the somewhat matronly rate of about 100 miles a day, generally using her engine only to maintain position when she stopped to work a station every two or three days. For the period, the expedition was also a very healthy one, for only 10 fatalities occurred amongst the total complement of 243 during the whole voyage. One of these was Willemoes Suhm's tragic death from erysipelas while the ship was in the Pacific. But they lost a further 61 ratings through desertion, evidently caused in part by a desire for a cheap passage to Australia as well as by the arduous and tedious routine of the sounding and dredging operations which often took many hours. The ratings were not the only ones affected, for many of the officers became discontented with their lot long before the voyage was over, and even amongst the scientists only Wyville Thomson seems to have retained his enthusiasm to the end. Yet the expedition was not all tedium, for of the 1281 days spent away from home, 568 were spent in harbours in all quarters of the world. During these shore breaks the officers and scientists made extensive zoological, geological and ethnological collections and socialised with all manner of 'locals' ranging from the King of Portugal to recently cannibalistic Fijian natives! By the time the ship returned to Spithead in May 1876, the expedition had already provided answers to some of the significant oceanographic questions which had been posed at the outset. There was now a much clearer idea of the form of the great ocean basins down to the greatest depth sounded at 4475 fathoms, including the important discovery of a submarine ridge running the length of the Atlantic Ocean. The varying types of sea-bed samples had been classified and it had been conclusively demonstrated that the deep-sea oozes were made up of the skeletons of tiny organisms which lived in the upper layers of the sea rather than on the bottom, a subject which had caused considerable controversy during the decade before the Challenger sailed. Ample evidence had been obtained of the existence of a rich and varied fauna in the very deepest regions, although there was no evidence that the ocean depths were occupied by 'living fossils' as some biologists had expected. These results were apparent from the relatively cursory investigations which had been carried out on board, but the detailed examination of the massive collections of animals and plants, water and sea-bed samples, and of the vast quantities of numerical data had still to be accomplished. The mammoth task of organising the distribution of the material to the scientists who were to work on it and the publication of the results initially fell to Wyville Thomson. This involved him in a series of acrimonious exchanges with many individuals and institutions, including the Trustees of the British Museum who demanded that the specimens should go directly to the national collection instead of being separately distributed from an office in Edinburgh as Wyville Thomson wished. With the aid of the Royal Society Thomson eventually won this tussle, but the strain of the responsibility of establishing a style for the publication of the official reports with opposition from those who did not understand the requirements for accurate scientific investigations and illustrations, as well as the rigid accountability forced upon him, proved too much for his highly strung but unmethodical nature. He broke down first in 1879, and in 1881 when the initial five year grant from the Treasury came to an end he collapsed, resigned his professorship, and took to his bed to die in The reins were taken up by John Murray under whose forceful leadership the publication of the results was finally completed in 1895, almost a quarter of a century after the ship set sail. The fifty thick royal quarto tomes of the report, containing pages, were written by an international galaxy of scientists and many of these reports still form a starting point for specialist studies in oceanography. Similarly, many of the original samples on which the reports were based, including nearly 4000 new species of animals taken by the trawls and dredges, are still referred to by scientists from a11 over the world. The reports were the tangible evidence of the achievements of the Challenger venture, but perhaps of much greater importance in the long term was the co-operation between scientists of many countries, inspired by Wyville Thomson's leadership, which set the young science of oceanography on the path to becoming the truly international discipline that it is today. Postscript HMS Challenger's foray into oceanography interrupted an otherwise unremarkable career. In 1862 she had taken part in operations against Mexico, including the occupation of Vera Cruz, but otherwise the only action which she saw seems to have been a punitive operation in 1866 against some Fijian natives to avenge the murder of a missionary and some of his dependents. After her three years of glory, her fate was even more ignominious. Commissioned as a Coast Guard and Dril1 ship of Naval Reserves at Harwich in July 1876, she was finally paid off at Chatham in She remained in reserve until 1883, when she was converted into a receiving hulk in the River Medway, where she stayed until she was finally broken up for her copper bottom in Despite the great excitement which surrounded her middle years, virtually nothing, apart from her figurehead, now remains. This is on display in the foyer of Southampton Oceanography Centre. HMS Challenger's Chemical Laboratory
22
Ernest Haeckel ( ) Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 — August 8, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist and philosopher who promoted Charles Darwin's work in Germany. Haeckel was a zoologist, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including "phylum" and "ecology." His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature). 1904
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Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964)
CARSON, Rachel Louise Writer, scientist, and ecologist. Carson grew up in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women in 1929, and later studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. She received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in She wrote her most famous book, Silent Spring, in U.S. President Kennedy was impressed with her ideas and called for a testing of the chemicals mentioned in her book. DESCRIPTION OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS: After completing her education, Carson joined the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries as the writer of a radio show entitled "Romance Under the Waters," in which she was able to explore life under the seas and bring it to listeners. In 1936, after being the first woman to take and pass the civil service test, the Bureau of Fisheries hired her as a full-time junior biologist, and over the next 15 years, she rose in the ranks until she was the chief editor of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. During the 1940s, Carson began to write books on her observations of life under the sea, a world as yet unknown to the majority of people. She resigned from her government position in 1952 in order to devote all her time to writing. The idea for her most famous book, Silent Spring, emerged, and she began writing it in It was published in 1962, and influenced President Kennedy, who had read it, to call for testing of the chemicals mentioned in the book. Carson has been called the mother of the modern environmental movement. (1907–64), American marine biologist, author of widely read books on ecological themes. Born in Springdale, Pa., and educated at the former Pennsylvania College for Women and Johns Hopkins University, she taught zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to She was aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the Fish and Wildlife Service, from 1936 to Her books on the sea, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), for which she was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in nonfiction, and The Edge of the Sea (1955), are praised for beauty of language as well as scientific accuracy. In Silent Spring (1962), she questioned the use of chemical pesticides and was responsible for arousing worldwide concern for the preservation of the environment. Marine biologist at U.S. Bureau of Fisheries & Fish & Wildlife Service
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Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer (1907-2004)
a child I lived a few years (mid-1970's) in East London on the coast of South Africa. One of East London's claims to fame -and deeply ingrained in local civic pride - was the discovery of the Coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish that had previously been known in the fossil record. That first coelacanth is still on display (left, image Source & Copyright © ) at the East London Museum which I would often visit while on my lunch break at Selborne College. This fish was caught on the 22 of December by Captain Hendrik Goosen who had been trawling off the Chalumna River near East London. By previous agreement he had called in Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of the East London Museum, to have a look at his catch. Amoung the fish he had netted she noticed "the most beautiful fish I had ever seen, five feet long, and a pale mauve blue with iridescent silver markings." She had no training in ichthyology and could find no record of the fish in her collection of books, so she sent a letter and a rough sketch off to a friend, Dr. J.B.L Smith, a chemistry professor at Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
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Margaret Mary Smith (wife of J.L.B. Smith) Sea Fishes
Pamanzi (Comores), 29th December 1952:
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Navy officer, explorer, film maker, inventor of scuba (1947)
Jacque Cousteau ( ) Navy officer, explorer, film maker, inventor of scuba (1947) "From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”
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Eddie Widder http://www.oceanrecon.org/cfiles/bioluminescence.cfm
Biography What is your actual title? Edith Widder, CEO, President and Senior Scientist, Ocean Research & Conservation Association. Where do you work? Ocean Research & Conservation Association, an organization that I cofounded in 2005. What sparked your initial interest in the marine world? When I was 11 years old I got to visit Fiji with my parents and I was fascinated by all the amazing creatures I saw on the reef - things like giant clams and blue starfish and lionfish. Who influenced you or encouraged you the most? My parents loved learning and they passed that love on to me. Do you travel often? Yes, for scientific meetings and for research expeditions. Tell us more about your research and the types of things you do. My interest is in bioluminescence -- how and why there are so many creatures in the ocean that make light. To answer my questions I have had to develop special instruments that can measure and record the light. What is the most fascinating thing you have ever seen or done? The first deep dive I made was in the single-person submersible Wasp. When I turned out the lights and saw all the bioluminescence that seemed to be everywhere I looked. I was hooked. The experience changed the course of my career. What are the personal rewards of your work? I love learning new things and I love exploring. Those would be reward enough, but the icing on the cake is the amazing light show I see every time I make a dive in a submersible and turn out the lights. It still thrills me. How does your work benefit the public? In order to be good stewards of the ocean we have to know how many animals there are, how they are distributed and how they behave. A lot of my research revolves around answering these questions with innovative technological developments. And now at ORCA, the organization that I helped found, we are developing technological solutions to ocean conservation challenges. Some of these involve the use of bioluminescence as a means of monitoring ocean health. What else could someone with your background do? I love research but I also enjoy teaching and writing and have even written a couple of children’s books about bioluminescence. What are the educational requirements for your job? I have a Ph.D. in neurobiology, which probably isn’t what you’d expect based on the kind of work I do. I intended to study the neurobiology of marine organisms but then I got an opportunity to make a dive in a submersible and I became completely fascinated by bioluminescence. I had to learn a lot of new material to change the direction of my research but that’s the wonderful thing about being a research scientist – you are always learning new things. What is the salary range? After completing a Ph.D., postdocs make $20-25,000. With each rung up the ladder from assistant scientist to associate scientist to senior scientist salary increases until a senior scientist in my position is making between $90,000 - $150,000. How many hours do you work? The number of hours I work varies between 8 hours/day to as much as 20 hours/day. I try to work only as long as I'm being efficient, but sometimes on research cruises there is no choice. Looking back, was there anything you would have done differently in your education or career journey? I would have taken more advanced mathematics. What obstacles did you encounter along the way? Funding is always a challenge but with persistence I have generally been able to find support for the projects that I think are important. What are your hobbies? I either roller blade or bicycle everyday and I also enjoy kayaking and cooking. (top)
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Eugenie Clark Marine biologist Dr. Eugenie Clark aka “The Shark Lady” is being inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame. Clark founded Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota in 1955, now a national center for shark and marine mammal research. Clark leads diving expeditions in search of new knowledge about the nature and habits of ocean animals. She is a professor emerita at the University of Maryland, an adviser to environmental associations and an honorary member of marine organizations such as the Society of Women Geographers, National Geographic Society and Underwater Society of America. Clark has produced documentaries for the National Geographic Society, including “The Sharks” and “About Shark.” She was inducted into the International Explorer’s Society in 2008 Read more: Mote Marine’s “Shark Lady” a Women’s Hall of Fame member | Tampa Bay Business Journal Dr. Eugenie Clark, known as "the shark lady," was born in New York City where she attended school. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College and Master of Arts and doctoral degrees from New York University. In 1968, she joined the faculty at the University of Maryland College Park, where she is currently a professor of zoology. She has given lectures at over 60 colleges and universities in the United States. She also has given lectures in 19 foreign countries, and conducted summer science training programs at the high school and college levels. Clark's interest in fish began at the age of nine when her mother took her to visit an aquarium. She became fascinated by the fish she saw, especially the shark, and was soon going back every week. This fascination was fostered by her mother, who bought her a small tank of guppies. When it was time to go to college, she knew she wanted to be an ichthyologist - a person who studies and works with fish. She went on to become a world-famous scientist and pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes. Her search for answers has taken her around the world and below the waters of the seven seas. She carried the flag of the Society of Women Geographers to Ethiopia, carried it underwater off Japan and Egypt and carried the flag of the National Geographic Society to Egypt, Israel, Australia, Japan and Mexico. Clark has been diving with sharks for more than 30 years. She is active in the scuba-diving based field research on fish and submarine dives. An accomplished and prolific writer, she has shared the adventures and excitement of her scientific research through her articles in scientific journals, lectures and television specials, and articles in such popular magazines as National Geographic and Science Digest. She is the author of two books: Lady with a Spear, 1953 (book -of-the-Month Club Selection) and The Lady and the Sharks, 1969. Clark is the recipient of numerous honors, awards and citations for her work. She is the founding director of the Mote Marine Laboratory (established in 1955 as the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory). The Mote Marine Laboratory is where the Dr. Eugenie Clark Chair for Scientific Research has been established to provide the opportunity for young scientists to follow in her footsteps.
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Sylvia Earle “Her Deepness”
Inspired by the work of William Beebe, Dr. Sylvia Earle (1935-) began her work as an oceanographer at the tender age of 3 when she was knocked off her feet by a wave. She was fascinated by the ocean and its creatures at a very early age growing up near the shore in New Jersey and later in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. She began her studies with marine botany based on her belief that vegetation is the foundation of any ecosystem. Although she struggled to balance her studies and starting a family, Earle earned her PhD from Duke University, becoming well known in the marine science community for her detailed studies of aquatic life. Early in her career, and while she was four months pregnant, Earle traveled 30.5 m/100 ft below the surface in a submersible. This was the first of many submersible dives she would make during her career. Her experience living in an underwater marine habitat earned her celebrity status in the scientific community. In 1969, the Smithsonian Institute released a call for proposals that was circulated in the marine science community for those interested in conducting research while living in an underwater habitat. Earle submitted a proposal describing her intention to use the opportunity to study the ecology of marine plants and fishes in great detail by combining her observations with those of the ichthyologists on board. Unfortunately, the other applicants were male, and the review board deemed Earle's cohabitation with them inappropriate. Her request to be a part of the Tektite I mission was rejected; however, the Smithsonian later proposed an all-female Tektite II mission which Earle became a part of. The Tektite II mission received a lot of attention at the time (1970) because of its all female crew. Following her experience aboard the underwater habitat, Earle developed an interest in deep sea exploration, and in 1979 she broke the record for deep diving at 381 m/1,250 ft below the surface in a special suit called the Jim suit designed to withstand the pressure. Her record has not been broken. Earle decided to test the Jim suit as part of her research on a book published by National Geographic "Exploring the Deep Frontier", and out of her frustration that scuba diving techniques only scratched the surface of the ocean. Following this adventure, Earle started two companies that manufacture deep sea exploration vehicles. The continued advancements in the the technology of these vehicles has helped open up areas in the deep sea previously unexplored. During the 1990s, Earle served as Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She is currently an Explorer-in-Residence with National Geographic, and, in addition to her research, remains committed to raising awareness on marine environmental issues. “Her Deepness”
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Ballard & Grassle (1977) Hydrothermal Vents Alvin to Galapagos
Dr. Robert Ballard (1942-), also a deep-sea explorer, may be best known for finding the Titanic using technologies he helped to develop, including the Argo/Jason remotely operated vehicles and the technology that transmits video images from the deep sea. His earlier deep sea explorations led to the first discovery of hydrothermal vents during an exploration in a manned submersible of the Mid-Ocean Ridge. Ballard founded the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence Laboratory and spent 30 years there working on the use of manned submersibles. Ballard has devoted a great deal of time to furthering the field of deep sea exploration. He created a distance-learning program with more than one million students enrolled, taught by more than 30,000 science teachers worldwide. He also founded the Institute for Exploration located in Mystic, Connecticut for the study of deep-water archaeology which led to the discovery of the largest number of ancient ships ever found in the deep sea. Currently, he is a National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, and Director of the Institute for Archaeological Oceanography. The first hydrothermal vent was discovered in They are known to exist in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Most are found at an average depth of about 2,100 meters (7,000 ft) in areas of seafloor spreading along the Mid-Ocean Ridge system— the underwater mountain chain that snakes its way around the globe. Dr. Ballard is President of the Institute For Exploration, founder and Chairman of the JASON Foundation for Education, and Chairman of Odyssey Corporation. He is also Scientist Emeritus in Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He has won numerous awards for his continuing work. As part of his studies, Dr. Ballard has led or participated in over 100 deep-sea expeditions including the use of the deep-diving submersible ALVIN, ARCHIMEDE, TRIESTE II, TURTLE, BEN FRANKLIN, CYANA, and NR-1. These missions include the first manned exploration of the Mid-Ocean Ridge; the discovery of warm water springs in the Galápagos Rift; the first discovery of polymetallic sulfides; the discovery of high temperature "black smokers;" the discoveries of the R.M.S. TITANIC, the battleship BISMARCK, 11 warships from the lost fleet of Guadalcanal and the WWII aircraft carrier YORKTOWN; and exploration of the LUSITANIA and hospital ship BRITANNIC. Dr. Ballard has published over 50 scientific articles in refereed journals including Science, Nature, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and many others. He received the Newcomb Cleveland Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for an article he co-authored in Science detailing their discovery of high temperature vent fields in the East Pacific Rise. Dr. Ballard has also written many articles for the general public, including ten in National Geographic Magazine. For this work he received the Westinghouse Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The books he has written on discovering the R.M.S. TITANIC and the German battleship BISMARCK are best sellers. His first novel, "Bright Shark" and "Explorer," a children's pop-up book, were released in "The Lost Ships of Guadalcanal," was published in October of His autobiography, "Explorations" and "Exploring the LUSITANIA," both were published in His latest book, "Return to Midway" was published in 1999. Dr. Ballard has participated in the production of numerous television programs for various networks. From 1989 to 1991, he served as host of the weekly National Geographic Explorer program shown on Turner Broadcasting System. Dr. Ballard was also technical advisor on "SeaQuest DSV" during its premiere season in 1993/1994. He graduated from the University of California as a distinguished military graduate with a Commission in Army Intelligence. Later he transferred to the U.S. Navy, and during the Vietnam War he served on active duty as an Ensign, Lt. J.G. and finally as a Lieutenant. Dr. Ballard has rejoined the U.S. Naval Reserve as a Commander. Dr. Ballard attained his B.S. in Geology and Chemistry from the University of California. He got his Ph.D. in Marine Geology and Geophysics from the University of Rhode Island, and attended the graduate schools at USC and the University of Hawaii. Alvin to Galapagos Discovered hydrothermal vents Sulfur-rich vents 660 oF, but quickly cool to 73 oF Unique communities New kingdom of bacteria
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Late 19th century – early 20th century:
Founding a number of important marine laboratories, including coastal labs and open ocean labs. 1888 Founded 1930 Founded 1903
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