Marine Biology

MARINE BIOLOGY

MARINE BIOLOGY. Study of life along the seashore, which became known as marine biology by the twentieth century, was first developed and institutionalized in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Two distinct traditions contributed to its modern disciplinary form.

First to emerge was marine biology as a summertime educational activity, chiefly designed to instruct teachers of natural history about how to study nature within a natural setting. The notion was first suggested to Louis Agassiz, the Harvard zoologist and geologist, by his student Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Shaler had conducted highly successful summer field experiences for geology students, and felt that similar experiences could be valuable for biology students. Encouraged by his wife, Elizabeth—a longtime advocate for educational opportunities for the largely female teaching community—Agassiz obtained funding and opened the Anderson School of Natural History in 1873 on Penikese Island, located not too distant from Cape Cod. Following this school, several others offered similar experiences. The Summer School of the Peabody Academy of Sciences (Salem, Massachusetts) sponsored instruction for teachers in marine botany and zoology in 1876, and the Boston Society of natural History, with the support of the Women's Education Association (WEA) of Boston, started its summer station north of Boston at Alpheus Hyatt's vacation home in Annisquam.

The second tradition was European, where several marine stations operated by 1880, most notably the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. This marine biology laboratory was founded by Anton Dohrn in 1872. The "Mecca for marine biology," as Naples was soon known, attracted scholars from throughout the world. Agassiz's son, Alexander Agassiz, imported Dohrn's notion to his summer home near Newport, Rhode Island, offering the latest microscopical tools for researchers. William Keith Brooks, a student of the elder Agassiz, accepted the invitation and completed his doctoral research with the younger Agassiz in 1875. Then, when Brooks obtained a position at America's first graduate university, Johns Hopkins University, one of his first tasks was to create a research laboratory in marine biology. Thus, the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory was opened in 1878

The first U.S. marine biology laboratory to incorporate both traditions was the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), which opened in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in 1888. It originally offered courses in marine botany and marine zoology for beginning students and teachers. But its original director, C. O. Whitman, had spent time at Naples and, like his colleague Brooks, wanted to create research opportunities in marine biology for more advanced students and researchers. To accomplish the task, Whitman initiated advanced courses in embryology, invertebrate zoology, cytology, and microscopy, all of which began to attract more sophisticated students. By the early twentieth century, the MBL welcomed only advanced students and investigators.

Similar marine biology laboratories were founded on the Pacific Coast. Stanford University established the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, in 1892. To the north, the University of Washingt on opened a marine station near Friday Harbor (San Juan Islands, Washington) in 1904. Henry Chandler Cowles, an ecologist from the University of Chicago who had done pioneering studies on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan started a course in intertidal ecology, the first such course in the United States.

One additional West Coast laboratory played a critical role in defining the new field of marine biology, albeit by exclusion. William Emerson Ritter, an embryologist from Berkeley, created a laboratory near San Diego, initially named the San Diego Marine Biological Laboratory, in 1903. But Ritter was interested in a more global approach to investigations by the seashore, an approach he never successfully defined. He was successful, however, in attracting the financial resources of the Scripps family, and soon the Scripps Institution for Biological Research was built north of the village of La Jolla. Ritter specifically stated that he had no intention of forming another MBL on the West Coast, preferring to emphasize a comprehensive study of the sea. After he retired, without creating an educational base for the institution similar to the other stations, he was replaced by Thomas Wayland Vaughan in 1924. The La Jolla station was renamed the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and marine biology disappeared as a focus.

The three major American marine biology stations throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century are the MBL, Hopkins Marine Station, and Friday Harbor Laboratories. By the end of world War I (1914–1918), the stations defined marine biology as the study of life in the littoral zone (also known as the inter-tidal zone), or the area that serves as an interface between the marine and terrestrial environments. Courses at the laboratories helped to divide marine biology into several specialty areas, including invertebrate zoology, ecology, algology, embryology, and invertebrate physiology. Following World War II (1939–1945), this focus shifted somewhat as more research funding was available in the biological sciences, especially in terms of research questions with an application to medicine and to the exciting field of molecular biology. Woods Hole's MBL, for example, has all but abandoned the traditional areas of marine biology for specialized medical and genetic research. Most investigations at the MBL by the end of the twentieth century were laboratory-based studies of cellular and molecular processes, with little fieldwork or studies of marine life. At the same time, largely because the West Coast has a more robust intertidal fauna and flora that is largely unaffected by human intervention, Hopkins and Friday Harbor retain a traditional focus on marine biology.

For the most part, marine biology does not include investigations of the open seas, studies of freshwater marine systems, or inquiries into the country's fisheries. Biological oceanography, a subdiscipline of Oceanography, examines biological questions in the oceans, including studies of marine mammals, marine fisheries, and freshwater sources for the ocean (limnology).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benson, Keith R. "Laboratories on the New England Shore: The 'Somewhat Different Direction' of American Marine Biology." New England Quarterly 56 (1988): 53–78.

———. "Summer Camp, Seaside Station, and Marine Laboratory: Marine Biology and Its Institutional Identity." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32, no. 1 (2001).

Maienschein, Jane. 100 Years Exploring Life, 1888–1988: The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1989.

Keith R. Benson

See also Science Education ; Zoology .