All previous contributors to Porcupine!'s 'Six Papers that Shook' have been academics. Now, having apparently exhausted the available supply of willing or co-opted professors and senior researchers, the editors have seen fit to ask me to make a contribution. This may be an unwise decision but at least it will provide an account from someone who has not pursued a formal career of research. As is the case with many of the previous contributors, books have had far more of an impact on me than papers. The vast majority of papers I have read have left no perceptible impact on me at all. Indeed, I cannot remember them. This may say more about my memory than the quality of the papers but to me many of them had little worthwhile to say or were incredibly boring.
1. The first book that made an impression on me was The Observer's Pocket Guide to Birds by Frederick Warne. This little book enabled me to put a name to most of the bird species that I had encountered in and around my childhood environment at the outskirts of Brighton, UK. The page layout included two pages of colour photographs followed by two pages with black and white photographs. The images were small and positive identification using the black and white photographs near impossible. The interesting thing I recall about the book was that I already knew many of the birds depicted; I just didn't happen to know what they were called. I also realised that few people around me appeared to share my interest in finding out the names of these delightful creatures. Undaunted, I requested many other identification books in the 'Observer' series for birthdays etc. and soon found myself identifying everything that moved or grew in a five mile radius from my home. Since these little books had such an impact on me I must mention one more of them in the series which was The Observer 5 Pocket Book of Pond Life. I have always had a fascination for the aquatic environment and this little book was the first literature to foster this interest. By the age of eight I had already fallen in quite a number of different aquatic environments and was getting to know them far more intimately than my mother cared for. Bogs had a habit of stealing at least one of my shoes. I note that John Hodgkiss was also influenced by this excellent little series. In the sixties they were the only 'popular' publications widely available to the public in the UK.
2. Not many papers or books have 'shaken' me but the first serious scientific book that I read made me very angry and saddened at man's abuse of the environment. This book was Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962). Before Rachel Carson there was very little public interest in conservation and indeed the word 'environment' was not an everyday term. The book may have been one-sided but it was extremely well researched and accurate. It demonstrated the power of literature and was in part responsible for the subsequent ban on the use of DDT in the UK and elsewhere. Pesticides were responsible for the near extinction of Peregrine Falcons and other raptors in the US and UK. Happily, the Peregrines have now recovered but new problems are coming to light such as the oestrogenic effects of compounds like bisphenol. These compounds are implicated in the emasculation of Brown Trout in UK rivers and testicular cancer in men. Indeed, Rachel Carson herself died two years after publishing her book, from breast cancer, which may itself have been caused by the widespread use of chemicals. Her book and the plight of UK raptors such as the Peregrine and the Sparrowhawk strongly influenced me to study Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Reading, with a view to researching the problems caused by pesticides such as DDT. I did some undergraduate research on DDT at Reading and measured imbalances in mammalian metabolism caused by the build up of DDE in the liver. However, by the time I graduated the pesticide DDT was banned and the 'drins were only permitted in industrial use. I had little interest in developing new pesticides or biochemistry research so I decided to pursue an applied career and enrolled on an M.Sc. course in Applied Hydrobiology at the University of London.
3. At Chelsea College, University of London I was back in my element - the aquatic environment. Curiously, classical taxonomy held no fascination for me whatsoever. Then, I found it a dry, tedious subject and was far more interested in sampling aquatic habitats and analysing the data collected to quantify the impacts of industrial and organic pollution. One of the more memorable papers I read during my M.Sc. studies was The assessment of aquatic invertebrates using a scoring system by John Chandler. This paper described a method which attempted to quantify the impacts of pollution on stream invertebrate communities by allocating a score for each species of invertebrate. The method became known as the 'Chandler Score' system. For sensitive organisms such as stoneflies a high score was given and the more specimens in each species the higher the score credited. A total is then calculated for the site and used as a basis for comparison and pollution assessment. It was the first attempt to break away from indices such as the Trent Biotic Index, which were largely qualitative in nature, and quantify pollution. In fact the Chandler Score was in truth just another index system but it did provoke much thought and interest. I went on to complete an M.Sc. thesis in multivariate analysis of stream invertebrate communities. It was a pleasure to finally meet and work with John Chandler when he was Regional Fisheries Officer for Southern Water Authority and I was the Area Fisheries Officer for Kent and East Sussex, UK in the 1980s.
4. Chelsea College also introduced to me many books and papers which studied the freshwater environment. One of these books included T.T. Macan and E.B. Worthington (1951) Life in Lakes and Rivers which provides a first class introduction. This book was published in the New Naturalist series which I became very fond o. I have read many books in this series, the most notable of which, for me , is the Dragonflies by P.S. Corbet, C. Longfiled and N.W. Moore (1960). I was fortunate enough to meet Norman Moore in Japan in 1993 at a Dragonfly conference. He was the head of the Nature Conservancy Council and had conducted many original studies onto raptor populations in Britain. He is now involved with the IUCN and the Odonata 'Red Data List'. He has encouraged me to publish more on conservation issues and dragonflies, which I hope to do one of these days.
5. For my early career I worked as a biologist responsible for assessment of impacts of pollution in the UK's rivers. I was doing what I enjoyed most which was playing around in ponds, lakes and rivers and identifying their wildlife. Of the many keys I used in the identification work I have to single one out which was A.E. Gardner (1954), A key to the larvae of the British Odonata. Introduction and Part I, Zygoptera. Part II Anisoptera. Ent. Gaz. Long. 5:157-171; 193-213. This key and my own discovery of the habitat preferences for many of the British odonates laid the foundations for many years of happy dragonflying escapades into Europe and Asia.
6. Since I have been working in fisheries management for the last 15 years I feel duty bound to salvage some of my professional working credibility by using my last choice to mention a fisheries publication. In fact this an easy choice, for in the fisheries world there is a giant amongst all fisheries researchers/practitioners who is the most widely cited fisheries scientist of his generation. My choice is On the Sex of Fish and the Gender of Scientists - A collection of essays in fisheries science by Daniel Pauly (1994). Daniel Pauly is full of new and brilliant ideas about fisheries and fisheries management. Tony Pitcher wrote of the book, "This is a book that no-one will know they need until they see it. Then it will become essential reading material for anyone with a broad interest in fish and fisheries. " The book is published in one of the Chapman & Hall Fish and Fisheries Series. I have been lucky to be able to meet and talk fish with Daniel Pauly and other members of the University of British Colombia fisheries team who have been acting as sub-consultants to ERM-HK Ltd for AFD's Fisheries Resources Study and Artificial Reef Deployment Study. Pauly and Pitcher's contribution to these studies bring state of the art tropical ecosystem modelling to the assessment of Hong Kong's fisheries. Their work is being applied tot he artificial reef programme to help plan the restoration of Hong Kong's fisheries.
P.34-35
Back to Contents
Back to Porcupine Homepage
Go to Department Homepage
