University of California Berkeley (Zoology 112/212)
During the summer prior to Ed Ricketts death, University of California, Berkeley's Department of Zoology (in 1947) began renting space at Hopkins Marine Station to teach its summer course (Zoology 112/212). UC Berkeley continued to do this each summer through 1952. Of interest to note is the strong emphasis on the intertidal ecology presented in the final papers that resulted from these two courses.
From the Register of the University of California Part 2 By University of California1948 one finds the following courses listed.
S112. Invertebrate Zoology MR. LIGHT, MR. PITELKA, MR. SMITH
Lectures, laboratory, and field work. Fee, $4.50
Anatomy, classification, and natural history of common invertebrate animals.
Given at Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove. 4 Units
S212. Advanced Marine Zoology MR. LIGHT, MR. PITELKA, MR. SMITH
Lectures, laboratory, and field work. Fee, $4.50
This course or its equivalent at an approved marine biological station is required of all candidates for the Ph. D. degree in Zoology.
Given at Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove. 6 Units
Richard M. Eakin, in his publication, History of Zoology at Berkeley, University of California, 1987-1988, described how this renting of space in the Alexander Agassiz building began and ended. “When I became Chairman, [Sol Felty] Light and I began to think of a modest station on the coast near Berkeley for his summer instruction. I appointed a committee of Light, S.C. Brooks and Frank Pitelka to prepare a plan that I took to President Sproul. The response in his booming voice was: "Eakin, you already have a marine station at La Jolla.” Nothing would convince him that we needed a facility in northern California. World War II interrupted our lobbying. In 1946, I took up the cause again. One day Prexy telephoned to say that he and President Tressider of Stanford had talked about the possibility of using Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station at Pacific Grove for our summer courses. To discuss the proposal, Professor Lawrence Blinks, Director of the Hopkins Marine Station, and I met with the two presidents after their luncheon at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. Blinks and I waited patiently (or was it impatiently?) in the lobby of the Club. As a result of this conference Berkeley rented space at Pacific Grove for our courses in the summer of 1947 on a trial basis. About a week before the summer session was to begin Light drowned in Clear Lake. The course was brought off splendidly, however, by Frank Pitelka and Ralph Smith, who had recently joined our faculty. For additional staff I asked Theodore H. Bullock, then at UCLA and a former doctoral student of Light's, to join Pitelka and Smith.1
As described in the Stanford University Bulletin Annual Report of 1947, the following mention was part of the section pertaining to Hopkins Marine Station: “There were 40 students from Berkeley, Drs. Pitelka, Bullock and Smith taught the students from Berkeley, and occupied three offices, plus two large laboratories.”2
And described in the Stanford University Bulletin Annual Report of 1948, the following mention was part of the section pertaining to Hopkins Marine Station: "In 1947, space was occupied in the Agassiz laboratory for six weeks in the summer by a class of 25 from the Zoology Department of the University of California, (Berkeley), which was taught by Drs. Ralph Smith and Frank A. Pitelka, of that institution."3
Richard M. Eakin went on to outline the instructors of the course. "In the next five years our marine invertebrate summer courses (one undergraduate and one graduate) were given by Smith in collaboration with Pitelka (1948), C.M. Yonge from Glasgow (1949), Donald Abbott (1950) who was at the time one of Smith's graduate students and later a member of the Stanford faculty at the Hopkins Station, and William Berg (1948, 1952). The courses in 1951 were offered by Cadet Hand and Willard Hartman, an authority on sponges who was with us at Berkeley for a few years before resigning to accept a position in the Peabody Museum at Yale University. Our course in experimental embryology at Hopkins was given by Berg in 1948 and by Joan Rattenbury in 1950. There was a breakdown in negotiations between Stanford and UC, largely over the rent being asked."4
As mentioned by Richard M. Eakin, Don Abbott began his studies at UC Berkeley under the legendary S. F. Light and then, upon Light's death, completed his dissertation with Ralph Smith. In 1950 Abbott joined the faculty of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station.
Sol Felty Light
Sol Felty Light was an internationally known and respected zoologist who received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1926, with Charles A. Kofoid as his major advisor. His graduate research focused on termite systematics and the biology of symbiotic flagellates and freshwater copepods. Before beginning his work at Berkeley, Light spent two years teaching in a government school in Japan and two years in a high school in Manila. He joined the faculty of the University of the Philippines where he advanced from instructor to full professor and department head.From 1922 to 1924 he led the Department of Zoology at the new University of Amoy in China. Light's scientific activity while in China consisted of a series of systematic studies of marine invertebrates from tropical waters as well as on Oriental termites. He was then hired as a professor in the University’s Department of Zoology, a position he held for more than twenty years. Among his graduate students was Joel Hedgpeth who as we know became a good friend of Ed’s and, after Ricketts’s’ death, edited the third and fourth editions of Between Pacific Tides.
While the primary focus of Light’s handbook is taxonomic, he is sensitive to concerns that animals need to be considered in the context of their environments. He begins the introduction to his book by writing that “No picture of organisms which ignores their physical and organic environment can be even approximately complete. Studies of dead animals or their parts or even of living animals in the laboratory, valuable and indispensable as they are, give but partial pictures. In the studies here contemplated we seek a firsthand knowledge of living invertebrate animals in their natural setting, their behavior and interrelations, their distribution within the habitat, the influence of physical conditions on this distribution and the correlation between their structures and their behavior patterns on the one hand and the places they occupy in the environment on the other.”5
1. Eakin, Richard M. (1988) History of Zoology at Berkeley, University of California, 1987-1988, the Centennial Year. Department of Zoology. University of California. Berkeley, California 94720
2. Stanford University Bulletin Annual Report of The President of Stanford University for The Fifty-Sixth Academic Year Ending August 31, 1947. Stanford University, California Published by The University 1947
3. Stanford University Bulletin Annual Report of The President of Stanford University for The Fifty-Sixth Academic Year Ending August 31, 1948. Stanford University, California Published by The University 1948
4. Eakin, Richard M. (1988) History of Zoology at Berkeley, University of California, 1987-1988, the Centennial Year. Department of Zoology. University of California. Berkeley, California 94720
5. Light, Sol Felty (1941) Laboratory and field text in invertebrate zoology. Berkeley, Calif. : Associated students store, University of California, [c1941]