RICKETTS MEMORIAL LECTURE

Monterey Bay Research Symposium
Monterey Bay Aquarium
17 Nov. 1990

by Eugene Haderlie

Historical Perspectives on Marine Science Research in Monterey

When Steve Webster first suggested to me that I give the 5th Ricketts lecture on historical perspectives on marine science research in Monterey Bay I was reminded of something Lawrence Blinks of Hopkins said many years ago. He noted: "When your colleagues ask you to review the history of a field of science they are subtlety recognizing the fact that you are way over the hill.” Thank you Steve!

We are going to hear first-hand today about the many exciting scientific activities that are presently going on and are planned for Monterey Bay and the Central Coast of California. We have around the Bay at present perhaps the greatest concentration of marine science institutions of any area in the country with enormous potential for the future. It is fitting that we all get together and find out what each group is doing and try to coordinate our activities.

Most of you in the audience are part of one or more of these institutions or groups and most of you are active participants in the research work being done in the Bay. What some of you may not realize is that this widespread and intense activity is of relatively recent origin, and it may be of general interest to review the early history of oceanographic studies in the Bay.

What I propose to do this morning is briefly review what went on in the Bay up to the 1950s and 1960s when several new institutions interested, at least in part, in marine science were established. These new institutions included the Naval Postgraduate School and Fleet Numerical, the Beaudett Foundation for Biological Research (later to become the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories), the University of California at Santa Cruz, and most recently the Monterey Bay Aquarium, MBARI, and the NOAA Center for Ocean Analysis and Prediction.

For many years prior to the 1950s the California Department of Fish and Game and the Fish and Wildlife Service had engaged in fisheries research in the Bay and geologists from Scripps and the Geological Survey made several pioneering explorations. It was the Hopkins Marine Station, however, a branch of Stanford University, that was the first pioneering permanent institution on the Bay, and nearly all of the studies made during the first 50 years of this century were in one way or another associated with Hopkins. Even the California Department of Fish and Game had their resident researcher, Julie Phillips, housed at Hopkins.

When I first came to the Peninsula in 1947 most of the pioneers who had studied the oceanography, geology and biology of the Bay were still at Hopkins or were recently retired but still active. With the passing last year of Lawrence Blinks I seem to be the last biologist alive on the Peninsula who overlapped and personally knew many of these investigators. Much of what I have to say this morning will therefore be about Hopkins in the early days and the scientists associated with the Station either as permanent staff or visiting investigators.

Early History

Going back to the very early days the French La Perouse expedition of over 200 years ago was the first scientific expedition to visit Monterey Bay. Two ships entered the Bay in September 1786 and the naturalists aboard collected many plants and animals, including seeds of the Monterey pine. One of these Frenchmen even shot a grizzly bear on the Monterey Beach, and its skeleton was prepared and shipped back to the Natural History Museum in Paris where it can still be seen. It so happens that this specimen is the only complete California grizzly skeleton in existence--no others were collected and saved before the bear became extinct early in this century. The naturalists on this first expedition paid little attention to the marine life but they did collect some seashells as did Vancouver on his expedition to Monterey Bay in 1795. Starting the in 1830s many conchologists visited the Bay and made extensive collections and named many of the marine mollusc species we now know. By the 1860s biologists on small expeditions were dredging for specimens in the shallow water of the Bay.

Hopkins Marine Station

Hopkins was established in Pacific Grove in 1892 and is the oldest marine laboratory on the West Coast, indeed the third oldest in the country (after Woods Hole, 1888 and Cold Spring Harbor,1890). Hopkins conducted its first classes in 1892. The laboratory was founded by three professors from the newly established Stanford University with the financial help of one Timothy Hopkins, a wealthy railroad magnet, a friend of Leland Stanford, and a Stanford University trustee. Hopkins had visited Naples some years earlier and had visited Anton Dohrn's Stazione Zoologica. He was impressed with this well-known Naples laboratory and was sympathetic to building a similar laboratory for Stanford.

The new laboratory located on Lover's Point in Pacific Grove was called the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. Its stated purpose, as outlined in an early bulletin, was to supplement the work given in regular courses at Stanford in the zoological, botanical and physiological sciences and to allow faculty and visitors opportunities for research. The first bulletin also noted that the Stanford tuition for the five-week summer session was $20.00, and that tents could be rented at the Pacific Grove Chautauqua Assembly at reasonable rates! Alcohol was allowed only in the lab for scientific purposes.

In 1906 the name of the lab was changed at Mr. Hopkins request to the Marine Biological Laboratory, a mimic of that at Woods Hole. Ten years later, in 1916, it was realized that the lab on Lover's Point was too small and there was no room for expansion, so a new site was acquired to the southeast on what was called China Point. A new building was constructed on the new site in 1917. China Point had been the location of a Chinese fishing village that had burned in 1906. The name of the new laboratory was changed by the Stanford trustees to Hopkins Marine Station and Walter Fisher became the first resident director of the new facility. Fisher, though recently retired, was still active as an echinoderm systematist when I first arrived at Hopkins in 1947.

Fisher insisted that the new lab function the year around and have a resident faculty, but it took him nearly 10 years to assemble a reasonably sized permanent staff. By 1927 he was able to add the large Loeb Laboratory to the facility. The new building was named after the famous physiologist Jacques Loeb who had come to the Hopkins Seaside Lab briefly in 1898 as a visiting scientist. Loeb, however, was never on the faculty list of Hopkins, but he did have a private laboratory on what is now Monterey Bay Aquarium property and for many years early in this century carried on his well-known studies on artificial parthenogenesis in sea urchins.

The early resident staff included Tage Skogsberg who came from Upsalla, Sweden, and joined the faculty in 1925 where he taught courses in plankton and marine invertebrates. In 1931 he taught the first general oceanography class and began systematic oceanographic surveys by boat in the Bay. He became interested in the hydrography of the bay because of contact with a Hopkins visiting investigator.

Henry B. Bigelow from Harvard University spent 1928 as a visiting professor and Hopkins. During that time he made the first pioneering study of the hydrography of Monterey Bay. He established 31 stations throughout the entire Bay and examined the water for temperature, chlorinity, silicate, phosphate, nitrate, and oxygen.

Starting in 1929 and continuing until 1937 Skogsberg continued and expanded this work started by Bigelow. The major aims were to reach an understanding of the thermal structure and the water movements in the region and to determine seasonal and annual changes which characterize the Bay waters.

This work accomplished a great deal and laid the foundation for all subsequent studies. Patrol boats of the California Department of Fish and Game we, used to occupy 23 stations on a regular basis every 2 weeks or monthly. All samples were collected with standard Nansen water bottles and temperatures determined with reversing thermometers. Surface currents were plotted using subsurface drifters much like those used today (minus radar reflectors). These devices date back to the Challenger expedition.

Using these long-term studies as a basis, Skogsberg was able to recognize three hydrographic seasons in Monterey Bay that we still recognize. He correctly noted the role of the Davidson Current and measured the rates of upwelling in the Bay during the spring and summer months. He correctly identified the Monterey Submarine Canyon as a major influence on the temperature structure and circulation in the Bay. The submarine canyon had been described originally in 1897 by Davidson, and the Canyon was studied in detail in the 1930s and early 1940s by Francis Sheperd and his colleagues from Scripps and also by the Coast and Geodetic
Survey. Tage Skogsberg retired from Hopkins in 1950 and was replaced by Donald P. Abbott who was known to many of you here today.

Gilbert Smith joined the Hopkins staff in 1927 and spent his life studying the marine algae of the Monterey Peninsula which culminated in a classic book used by all marine biology students of the time and since.

George MacGinitie also came in 1927 with the title of instructor in zoology and custodian of buildings. In reality he was Walter Fisher's assistant, and was never quite accepted by the Stanford faculty because he did not have a doctorate. MacGinitie made pioneering ecological studies along the coast, particularly at Elkhorn Slough between 1927 and 1935.

The well-known Dutch microbiologist Cornelis van Niel joined the faculty in 1929 and soon made the microbiology lab at Hopkins the mecca for students in the field. His pioneering work in photosynthesis in microorganisms made van Niel and Hopkins known world-wide.

The last two Hopkins staff members I want to mention for this period came in the early 1930s. Rolf Bolin came as a Teaching Assistant in 1932 and after getting his doctorate at Stanford remained on the faculty. He did pioneering work on the cottid and lantern fishes of the Bay. In 1950 Bolin managed to secure the first major vessel for Hopkins, the 50 foot long “Tage." Many graduate students did work in the Bay in this vessel. Eric Barham, for example, in the early 50s used “TAGE” to study and sort out the deep scattering layers in the Bay. Starting in 1962.

Bolin directed the TE VEGA program. Several of you in this audience participated in these cruises in the Indian and South Pacific Oceans and along the coasts of Central and South America. Lawrence Blinks came to the main campus in Palo Alto in 1931, and spent many summers at Hopkins teaching plant physiology. In 1943 he succeeded Walter Fisher as Director of Hopkins.

CALCOFI

Following the decline of the sardine fishery starting in 1947 with total collapse in 1952, the California Cooperative Sardine Research Program was initiated. The program at first involved the California Academy of Sciences, California Department of Fish and Game, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This program began routine oceanographic cruises off the California coast, and that of Baja California, in 1949. Over 6,000 oceanographic stations were established along the coast, several of them within Monterey Bay. By 1953 Hopkins Marine Station had joined the group and the name was charged to the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations or CALCOFI. Over the years this program has produced and enormous amount of data not only on coastal fisheries 1but physical and chemical oceanographic data. Hopkins operated what has been called an "oceanographic weather station" on Monterey Bay from 1953 until 1975 with weekly cruises on “Tage" to sample water conditions and plankton. In many ways this was a continuation and refinement of Skogsberg's earlier work, but using much better techniques and modern instrumentation.

In closing this rambling chronology I would like to mention briefly Ed Ricketts. I overlapped with Ricketts only for one year and actually met him on only one occasion. Ricketts had come to the Monterey region in 1923 and had set up a biological supply house in Pacific Grove. He probably met John Steinbeck that year, for Steinbeck was living in Pacific Grove at the time and actually attended Hopkins in the summer of 1923 taking a course in marine invertebrates and another in English composition.

In the summer 1947 Ricketts took Don Abbott and I on a tour under the Municipal Wharf in Monterey and showed us some large acorn barnacles that he had observed to settle on the piling in 1926. He had marked them and had followed their growth rates for over 20 years, and I have been monitoring some of these same individuals since 1950 and a few of them are still alive after 64 years!

In 1947 I had not yet read Steinbeck's book Cannery Row which had been published two years earlier. I knew about Ricketts because of his book Between Pacific Tides which we were using as a text at Hopkins and which my students still use in summer quarters. Ricketts is now universally recognized as having been a first-rate observer and ecologist who was far ahead of his time in seeing the big ecological picture of marine organisms interacting with their biological and physical environment. At the time, however, he was not really appreciated, indeed he was rebuffed and not accepted as a colleague by Walter Fisher and a few who others at Hopkins. Rolf Bolin was about the only staff member who befriended him and made it possible for him to sneak in periodically and use the Hopkins library. Walter Fisher even tried to prevent Stanford Press from publishing Between Pacific Tides claiming that Ricketts had no proper academic credentials to qualify him for writing such a book. The book remains today the most popular and successful book ever published by Stanford University Press.

We now recognize Ed Ricketts for what he really was, a character to be sure, but a scholar, a first rate creative thinker, and a keen observer of both marine organisms and human beings. It is only right and proper that we honor him with these memorial lectures.

Thank you for your attention.

E. C. Haderlie
October 1990