Stations in the Field

A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930

Raf De Bont

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226141909
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

When we think of sites of animal research that symbolize modernity, the first places that come to mind are grand research institutes in cities and near universities that house the latest in equipment and technologies, not the surroundings of the bird's nest, the octopus's garden in the sea, or the parts of inland lakes in which freshwater plankton reside. Yet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a group of zoologists began establishing novel, indeed modern ways of studying nature, propagating what present-day ecologists describe as place-based research.Raf De Bont's Stations in the Field focuses on the early history of biological field stations and the role these played in the rise of zoological place-based research. Beginning in the 1870s, a growing number of biological field stations were founded—first in Europe and later elsewhere around the world—and thousands of zoologists received their training and performed their research at these sites. Through case studies, De Bont examines the material and social context in which field stations arose, the actual research that was produced in these places, the scientific claims that were developed there, and the rhetorical strategies that were deployed to convince others that these claims made sense. From the life of parasitic invertebrates in northern France and freshwater plankton in Schleswig-Holstein, to migratory birds in East Prussia and pest insects in Belgium, De Bont's book is fascinating tour through the history of studying nature in nature.

CHAPTER ONE

Stations and Other Places

When, by the late nineteenth century, the biological station had become a familiar workplace for life scientists, the urge grew to write its history and to celebrate its founding fathers. This enterprise quickly took on a patriotic flavor. The French were the first to claim fatherhood of the station movement. A gold-lettered inscription on the walls of the marine laboratory at Concarneau in Brittany, founded in 1859 by embryologist Victor Coste, claimed it was the first of its kind in the world. But the Belgians were quick to react. In a 1897 article, a Brussels science student bombastically proclaimed he had “the right and the duty to claim the glorious and fruitful initiative of marine zoological studies for Belgium.” The student in question singled out Louvain zoology professor Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden as the real inventor of the biological station. He insisted that Van Beneden had set up a laboratory in the Belgian coastal town of Ostend as early as 1843.1 Subsequently, historians have stuck to this foundation story.

Belgium’s glory fades a bit when one takes a closer look at its earliest biological station. Van Beneden had at his disposal a small room in an oyster farm, containing “aquariums, fishing nets, tables, chairs, a bit of glasswork and a few reagents—that’s all.”2 Before settling for Ostend, Van Beneden had tried other possibilities. With some effort he had managed to have living marine specimens sent to his cabinet at the university of Louvain, but quickly found out it was more convenient to take himself to the seaside than to have vulnerable marine invertebrates transported inland.3 He investigated several locales, but Ostend was the only Belgian coastal town within easy reach of the newly opened railway. This was important. In the midcentury, railways played a similar role in opening up the coast for scientists and tourists in several other European countries. Yet, in the case of Van Beneden, it was not only the railroad that linked him to Ostend; in 1843 he married the daughter of a wealthy local tradesman. This was important as well. It was after all his well-to-do father-in-law, rather than his university, who financed his station. As with later biological stations, Van Beneden’s marine laboratory was the product of private initiative and local alliances.4

Van Beneden’s idea of a biological station found a following—somewhat hesitantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm after 1870. Next to marine laboratories, stations for the study of freshwater organisms and birds were eventually set up. This chapter will survey these developments as they occurred in Europe in the century after 1843, and frame them in the changing political, cultural, and scientific context of the period. In so doing, the chapter will explore the intricate relations of the biological station with other places of research. These places include permanent research infrastructures outside the field (such as the university lab, the public aquarium, and the natural history museum) as well as transportable devices used to survey the field (such as expedition ships and mobile laboratories). From these other places, the field station selectively borrowed technologies, practices, and intellectual endeavors, gradually creating something new in the process.

PIONEERS

In contrast to what later historians have claimed, Van Beneden’s marine laboratory was not a complete novelty. After all, many late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century gentlemen-scientists had country houses, which they used as hubs to study locally available organisms. Some of these houses were located near the sea and some of them were rather well equipped. A good example is provided by the medieval-style castle of British gentleman John Stackhouse, elaborately described in a recent article by Anne Secord. The Stackhouse castle, built in the 1770s, had been set up on the Cornish coast so its owner could study seaweeds, which was a craze among the wealthy in late-eighteenth-century Britain. The castle’s lower floors contained baths to study algal fructification and allowed Stackhouse to mimic marine tidal effects indoors in order to experimentally unravel seaweed procreation in seminatural conditions.5 More than half a century later, Van Beneden would have envied such scientific luxury.

Despite some similarities, the stations of Stackhouse and Van Beneden should be framed in rather different contexts. The late-eighteenth-century infatuation with sea organisms was fuelled by gentleman (and lady) collectors, primarily interested in decorative specimens such as algae. The mid-nineteenth-century research, to the contrary, was largely driven by “professional” naturalists, who were equipped with compound microscopes and dredges, and whose interest mainly concerned the biology of marine invertebrates and fish. The foundation of the station in Ostend was only one of the many manifestations of this new interest. Van Beneden’s project was, after all, partially inspired by work across the borders. He knew of developments in England, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science had set up a Dredging Committee in the late 1830s. He was familiar with the work that Victor Audouin and Henri Milne-Edwards, professors at the prestigious Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, performed in a rented farmhouse on Brittany’s coast. And his friend, Berlin anatomy and physiology professor Johannes Müller, kept him well informed about the excursions that were launched from the North Sea island of Helgoland.6

Particularly Müller would prove influential for further events. He took a keen interest in Van Beneden’s station, which he visited in the revolutionary year 1848. As rector of the University of Berlin he had been confronted with rebellious liberal-minded students, and hoped a retreat from the metropolitan epicenter of revolutionary activity to the coastal periphery would calm him down.7 And it did. In a letter to his son, Müller recounted how in Ostend he could undertake embryological research “free of all emotions and sorrows.”8 After a few months, he traveled to Marseille and Nice and commenced what one of his biographers has described as his “years of sea research.”9 He temporarily overcame his depression and converted a new generation of students to “pelagic fishing.” Several scientists who founded marine stations in the following decades would explicitly refer to Müller’s agenda as the inspiration for their own enterprises. Often they shared his ideal of research in retreat.10

The work of Van Beneden, Müller, and other “pelagic fishers” needs be framed against the backdrop of the growing prestige that the study of marine invertebrates witnessed in the 1830s and 1840s. Although it is hard to exactly pin down the reason for this rise in status, one might point to a growing sense of the importance of marine invertebrates in the fossil record, and the fact that newly improved microscopes brought ever smaller sea creatures within sight of the naturalist. Overall, the growing interest in marine life did not seem to stem from a particular theoretical starting point, nor did it cluster around one particular problem. Questions of distribution and classification received a lot of attention, but so did physiological topics such as salinity tolerance or blood circulation, themes concerning embryological development, or newly discovered and biologically astounding phenomena such as polymorphism (the existence of different morphological forms within one species) and the alternation of generations (the existence of different morphologies within one species, of which more than one can reproduce). It was as a broadly conceived field that the study of marine invertebrates would capture the imagination of the leading representatives of the profession.11

Men such as Müller and Van Beneden might have pioneered marine zoology, but overall they did not greatly invest in workplaces to perform this study. Rather, they spent most of their time, energy, and money building up their university museum collections.12 Laboratories received less attention. When working on the coast, Müller stayed in hotels and even his famous Berlin laboratory was notoriously ramshackle. Van Beneden, then, might have set up a fixed seaside workplace, but it had a provisional outlook from the start. It was only rarely occupied and by no means equipped to house a research institute. Although Van Beneden occasionally received guests there, his station was primarily a private workplace. One of his early biographers stressed that Van Beneden always spoke of “my dune laboratory” with “the inflatedness of the proprietor.”13 His station belonged to the domestic sphere rather than to the world of scientific institutions, and Van Beneden never referred to its existence in his publications. In the following decades, however, the role, scale, and aura of the biological station would drastically change.

This shift was largely the accomplishment of one man: the aforementioned medical doctor Jean-Jacques-Marie-Cyprien-Victor Coste. Trained at Montpellier, England, and Scotland, Coste quickly rose through the academic ranks in Paris and became the first holder of the chair of embryology at the prestigious Collège de France in 1844. He set up an aquarium there to study fish behavior, which grew famous among the Parisian beau-monde. Political events enhanced his career. After the coup of 1851, he became personal physician to the new empress and close friends with Napoleon III. Quickly, he would be involved in the emperor’s bold plans for reforming France. Mixing the rhetoric of science, utility, and conquest, Napoleon III was eager to display his mastery over the French imperial landscape. He appointed Baron Haussmann to reorganize Parisian urbanism, he furthered plans to reforest large parts of the French countryside, and he strongly supported the foundation of a Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, which aimed to advance the management of animal resources through the acclimatization of exotic species. Finally, he hoped to domesticate the French waters (and overcome food shortages) by setting up an “aquaculture” scheme, applying agricultural techniques to ponds, lakes, and the sea. For this scheme he turned to Coste.14

France’s big aquacultural plans originated in 1850, when a commission was created to study the possibilities of increasing fish “production” in French seas and lakes. Coste soon earned himself a place in the commission alongside established scientific heavyweights, such as Milne-Edwards and Achille Valenciennes. On the basis of a series of expeditions, he dramatically reported on the rapid decline in fish populations, and he called for massive projects of repopulation and artificial fertilization.15 Coste had the ear of the government and in 1853 a station for aquaculture was opened in the Alsatian commune of Huningue. There, under the directorship of Coste, experiments were conducted to repopulate lakes, cross-breed different species, and acclimatize exotic fish. Coste soon saw possibilities to extend his project to the seas. On one of his research trips he had encountered Etienne Guillou, a Breton fisherman, who, encouraged by the Naval Minister, had set up a state-sponsored fish-breeding tank in the port of Concarneau. Soon after meeting, Coste and Guillou decided to join forces. Guillou’s tank was transformed in a “living laboratory” that officially opened in 1859. In the period of 1859–1861 alone it received no less than 400,000 francs in subsidies.16 The resulting infrastructure was impressive. Six reservoirs were created by dynamiting the rocks in front of the laboratory building. Covering a total surface area of 1,500 square meters, they made up, as Coste put it, “a little miniature sea.” Coste’s laboratory contained sixty-eight aquariums on the ground floor, and a library and work stations for visiting scientists on the first floor. In Coste’s own words the station constituted “a perfected research instrument, unprecedented in the history of science.”17

The project raised enthusiasm, particularly among Parisian naturalists who admired Coste for his ability to mobilize resources for the life sciences. Armand de Quatrefages, professor at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, was one of the many to praise Coste’s perseverance. In a brochure, he stressed that thanks to Coste “we have seen three ministries enter with an unprecedented generosity on the road of practical experimentation of the natural sciences, sciences that one day will be for the breeding of living beings, what physics and chemistry are for industry.”18 Well beyond his Parisian colleagues such as Quatrefages, Coste also reached members of provincial scientific societies and the general public with accessible publications and crowd-drawing aquariums at world exhibitions. But not everybody was enthusiastic. In several circles, open disappointment was expressed regarding the output of Coste’s aquacultural projects and, more generally, the inflated egos of elite Parisian scientists.19 Republican science popularizers condemned the expenses of Coste’s projects, while maritime administrators characterized the embryologist as “a false prophet and a utopist.” The notorious satirical newspaper Le Charivari ridiculed the aquacultural projects and caricatured Coste as an unworldly professor, taking baths in aquaria, teaching fish how to read, and feeding them until they grew so large that they started preying upon unsuspecting passers-by.20

FIGURE 1.1 A, a cartoon of Victor Coste “attending a thermal bath that suits him well” and B, an early depiction of his “vivarium-laboratory” in Concarneau. (Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)

Despite Coste’s self-proclaimed successes, he remained very controversial. All in all, his prominence in French public debates and his connection to Napoleon III probably hampered the development of biological stations as much as they stimulated it. At least during the 1860s, no other stations were founded and Coste’s “miniature sea” remained anomalous.21

THE CALL OF THE SEA

In 1870–1871 things changed. After the revolution in Paris and the war with Prussia, the Third French Republic came into being. In Versailles, the German Empire was proclaimed and Wilhelm I was crowned its first emperor. The newly founded Republic and the German Reich would both play leading, albeit rather different, roles in the take-off of the station movement in the following decades. The German Anton Dohrn set up the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, which turned into the most influential biological station of its day, but the French took the lead as far as quantity was concerned. In two decades the latter established no less than thirteen marine laboratories that geographically encompassed the country. The number would double over the ...