Why Study Biology by the Sea?

Karl S. Matlin, Jane Maienschein, Rachel A. Ankeny, Karl S. Matlin, Jane Maienschein, Rachel A. Ankeny

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226672939, 9780226672762
• eBook ISBN: 9780226673097
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

For almost a century and a half, biologists have gone to the seashore to study life. The oceans contain rich biodiversity, and organisms at the intersection of sea and shore provide a plentiful sampling for research into a variety of questions at the laboratory bench: How does life develop and how does it function? How are organisms that look different related, and what role does the environment play?

From the Stazione Zoologica in Naples to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, the Amoy Station in China, or the Misaki Station in Japan, students and researchers at seaside research stations have long visited the ocean to investigate life at all stages of development and to convene discussions of biological discoveries. Exploring the history and current reasons for study by the sea, this book examines key people, institutions, research projects, organisms selected for study, and competing theories and interpretations of discoveries, and it considers different ways of understanding research, such as through research repertoires. A celebration of coastal marine research, Why Study Biology by the Sea? reveals why scientists have moved from the beach to the lab bench and back.

PART ONE

Marine Places

ONE

Why Have Biologists Studied at the Seashore? The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory

Jane Maienschein

In the summer of 1893, Bashford Dean presented a public lecture at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. He spoke about the marine biological stations of Europe, noting that European biologists had long embraced the value of studying biology at the seashore. He pictured the biologist first learning about marine organisms at an inland European laboratory, studying material shipped from a coastal station. Then the student would visit one of those stations first to learn and then to carry out research. Dean pointed out that, with rich research materials, equipment, and libraries, “the station becomes, in short, a literal emporium, cosmopolitan, bringing together side by side the best workers of many universities, tending, moreover, to make their observations upon the best materials sharper by criticism, most fruitful in results.” He continued: “It has often been remarked how large a proportion of recently published researches [sic] was dependent, directly or indirectly, upon marine laboratories.” He noted that “general interest in the advancement of pure science” had become important in Europe in the previous decade but that the same was not true of the United States. He sought to improve awareness among Americans, and he saw the MBL as a place to make the case for why biologists need marine stations (Dean 1894, 212).

This essay addresses the question of why biologists have studied at the seashore by looking briefly at previous answers such as Dean’s. I first explore early studies at the seashore, then review Charles Kofoid’s 1910 survey of marine stations. Historians extended Kofoid’s story in a series of symposia and volumes around 1988, in connection with the MBL’s centennial. This essay provides a summary of those studies and the resulting traditional picture of biology by the sea.

The essay then focuses on the MBL to show how Americans first embraced biology at the seashore. As the MBL’s first director, Charles Otis Whitman, noted, the MBL offered a clear vision for an independent institution that brought together what he called instruction and investigation. From the beginning, the MBL leaders understood that students and researchers learn from each other and discover together and that they do so across the boundaries that normally separate biologists into different institutions and different disciplines with access to different tools and organisms. Having a building with running seawater, easy access to a wide diversity of research organisms, and a community of other curious biologists made the MBL and other marine institutions valuable. Coming together to carry out biology by the seashore has allowed new and otherwise unachievable biological advances for more than 130 years.

Despite this record of success, however, the viability of some marine institutions has recently come into question. In the United States, limited federal funding for biomedical research has made the traditional extended summer stays at marine laboratories a luxury that many scientists cannot afford. The positive aspects of year-round facilities by the sea are offset by the costs of maintaining them because many of the scientific and revenue-producing activities are in fact concentrated in the summer. In response to such challenges, institutions have hired full-time scientific staffs, hoping to support facilities with overhead charges on research grants, and have sought new conferences and courses to fill the off-season schedule. Fiercely independent institutions such as the MBL have found themselves responding to these sorts of pressures by affiliating with larger, deep-pocketed institutions (in MBL’s case, the University of Chicago). While understandable, such changes have raised questions about how to preserve the unique, collaborative culture of marine stations that have relied on their independence.

These are not new problems; explorations of the history of selected institutions that have persisted over generations and the work done there help illuminate where we are today. Reflecting on these historical studies informs our understanding of why marine institutions have been and remain important.

Why Did Researchers Study at the Seashore?

As Dean showed clearly, by the end of the nineteenth century, discoveries at marine biological stations had contributed significantly to knowledge about the fundamental biology of organisms. Careful natural historical observations and experiments, typically during summer visits, continued to increase knowledge about such basic biological phenomena as fertilization, development, heredity, cells, regeneration, physiology, and the way in which external conditions influence biological processes. Technological developments in microscopy and imaging methods then enticed researchers to take their organisms from the beach indoors to the laboratory bench.

As with so many aspects of nature, the story of marine studies actually starts millennia earlier with Aristotle, who found marine life fascinating and informative for providing insights about living organisms. In his works focused on central phenomena of living systems, including The Parts of Animals, The Generation of Animals, The History of Animals, The Movement of Animals, and The Progression of Animals, he documented natural history, development, and distribution of marine as well as terrestrial organisms. Despite the obvious problems with these types of attribution, he is often referred to as the father of marine biology.1

Although others also studied marine organisms, it was not until the nineteenth century that significant numbers of investigators began to undertake “nature study” at the beachside, often as a way of enlightening and educating a general population about life (Armitage 2009; Kohlstedt 2015). Others looked into the ocean depths for pragmatic reasons, such as the need to know about the ocean bottom when laying transatlantic cable in the 1850s (Thomson 1873; Anderson and Rice 2006). Though oceanography remains separate from marine biology as a discipline, discoveries of marine creatures in the ocean depths raised questions about the processes of living systems. Other drivers for the study of marine life have come from commercial interests in fisheries or from imperialistic motives to establish what lands could be conquered, what resources could be commanded, and what information could be controlled (see, e.g., Osborne 1994). In short, diverse interests have taken researchers to the seashore.

Exploring expeditions in the nineteenth century involved observing but also collecting and documenting, with the result that major exploring expeditions typically carried along at least one naturalist and an artist. Naturalists such as Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin, for example, found their lives and their ideas about nature significantly affected by long expeditions across oceans as they developed evolutionary explanations of the rich organic diversity they observed and recorded.

Huxley’s study of relatively simple marine life-forms led him to ideas about protoplasm as a material basis for life and to reflection on ways that study of individual development through ontogeny relates to evolutionary development of species or phylogeny (Huxley 1913, vol. 1 [discussing the Rattlesnake voyage, especially during the years 1846–50]). In Germany, Ernst Haeckel pursued similar questions about the connections of development and evolution through his biogenetic law, which held that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. His extensive study of marine organisms and his beautiful color drawings and paintings of marine life provided him the authority for his claims about both evolution and development (Richards 2008). Comparing development and morphology of different species suggested relationships among them. These studies took place at the sea but initially in the absence of marine stations or established institutions.

Aquariums provided another form of access to marine study, allowing observation of marine life without having to be actually at the seashore. Yet, until the late nineteenth century, there were only a few public aquariums, and only the wealthy could afford to keep the water sufficiently clean and aerated in their own aquariums at home (Barber 1984). Aquariums housed specimens for researchers as well as attracting public interest in marine studies, but they did not re-create nature, and they did not yet serve as laboratories (Nyhart 2009; de Bont 2015; Muka 2017). They were central to some—such as the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli (SZN)2—but not all marine stations.

A growing number of researchers began to move from the beach to comfortable rooms. They could study the natural history and environment outdoors, then move indoors to spread their collected specimens out on tables for further study while storing living organisms in seawater tanks. Researchers began to rent rooms where they could look closely with microscopes and other equipment that they could set up and use day after day and record their findings over longer periods of time than was convenient at the beach. They did not have to carry their specimens far and therefore could observe embryological development and physiological processes of the living organisms that would have been harder to study if the organisms had had to travel in jars for longer distances. Itinerant researchers—including notably Anton Dohrn and Ernst Haeckel, who rented rooms for research—soon began to long for even more permanent facilities where they could set up labs, leave their equipment, and return the next year to continue their research in reliable surroundings (Richards 2008; de Bont 2015).

By 1900, increasing numbers of researchers who aspired to become professional biologists had joined the migration to summer marine research sites and to a growing variety of institutions providing opportunities for seaside study. Small places for just one researcher and a handful of students existed alongside the magnificent building for the SZN founded by Dohrn in 1872 (Simon 1980; Groeben 1984; Benson 1988). Government facilities emerged as well, such as that at Plymouth, England (Southward and Roberts 1987). By 1893, so many places existed around the world with such different styles and purposes that Bashford Dean’s MBL lecture may well have helped inspire the US government to commission a study to document and learn from what others were doing.

Kofoid’s 1910 Survey of Marine Stations

The international development of marine stations caught the attention of the Bureau of Education in Washington, DC, which was then part of the Department of the Interior. The commissioner of education, Elmer Ellsworth Brown, requested a study of European stations with a published book to record the results. In his letter of transmittal for the resulting volume, he noted that both scientific research and traditional instruction are essential for educational programs. He explicitly intended the study to promote advancement of stations in America like those in Europe (Kofoid 1910, xi).

Charles Atwood Kofoid and his wife, Julia, took on the study, visiting European freshwater and saltwater marine stations through 1908 and 1909. Kofoid was born in 1865 in Illinois, graduated from Oberlin College in 1890, and received a PhD from Harvard University for research on cell lineage. With an appointment as assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1903 until his retirement in 1936, he worked with William Emerson Ritter to develop the Marine Biological Association of San Diego, which later became the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His biography in the National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, explains his research commitments and his fascination with marine life, especially the plankton and protozoans (Goldschmidt 1951). It is also clear that the Kofoids enjoyed travel and discovering new places and new life-forms.

When he was asked to carry out the survey, Kofoid had already published the 1898 article “The Fresh-Water Biological Stations of America” in the American Naturalist. There he noted: “The fundamental purpose of all biological stations, both marine and fresh-water, is essentially the same. They serve to bring the student and the investigator into closer connection with nature, with living things in their native environment. They facilitate observation and multiply opportunities for inspiring contact with, and study of, the living world. They encourage in this day of microtome morphology the existence and development of the old natural history or, in modern terms, ecology, in the scheme of biological education” (Kofoid 1898, 391).

Kofoid went on to note that, while most marine stations were close to the sea, the United States had begun to offer some freshwater stations, especially in the Midwest. He pointed out that great potential for discovery lay in the mix of old-fashioned natural history description with e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• part one  Marine Places
• part two  Marine Practice
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index