The Lives They Lived: Joel Hedgpeth & Cadet Hand
Hyfler/Rosner
Joel Hedgpeth | b. 1911
Cadet Hand | b. 1920
The Old Men and the Sea
By ALAN BURDICK
New York Times Magazine
We fret about the biodiversity crisis, the quickening
extinction of plants and animals around the world. But
little is said about what you might call the
biodiversity-scientist crisis, the disappearance of
researchers skilled enough to identify the stuff in the
first place. Theirs is tedious work: peering at microscopic
blobs of plankton day after day, counting the tiny hairs on
tiny insect legs to distinguish one species from another.
Yet that is how new species are found and old ones
reconfirmed. Taxonomists are the librarians of life; without
them, nature's volumes are meaningless.
In Cadet Hand and Joel Hedgpeth, marine biology lost two of
its greatest documentarians. Hand, a longtime director of
the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, Calif., was an
expert on sea anemones and hydroids, which are among the
most common marine creatures. Hedgpeth, the world expert on
sea spiders, once ran the Marine Science Center at Oregon
State University. Between them they knew virtually all that
is known about life in and along the Pacific shore. When
they died, Hand at 86 and Hedgpeth at 94, each was more than
half as old as marine biology itself - a science whose
maturation was due, in no small part, to their influence.
The tide claimed them from the start. Hand, born on Long
Island, was raised near the Connecticut shore; as a child he
fished in gristmill ponds and was an avid fisherman - spin
and fly - his whole life. Hedgpeth grew up all around the
San Francisco Bay, especially in the Oakland home of his
grandfather, a prominent San Francisco attorney, who kept a
massive library. Its most compelling item was an 1887 book
titled "Sea and Land: An illustrated history of the
wonderful and curious things of nature existing before and
since the deluge." Next door lived a famous shell collector,
in a house filled with cabinets and drawers brimming with
shells laid out in semi-Darwinian sequence, whom young
Hedgpeth visited repeatedly. "It was sort of like the
pictures of the grand salon of the Nautilus from '20,000
Leagues Under the Sea,' " he later recalled.
Separate currents carried Hand and Hedgpeth to the
University of California at Berkeley, where they earned
zoology doctorates in 1951. Led by the luminary seashore
biologist S. F. (Sol Felty) Light, they collected specimens
at a beach near Half Moon Bay; they would sleep the night
before on the floor of a local restaurant, to catch the
early minus tide. Light had pressed Hand to study marine
pileworms, but he was set on sea anemones; by the late 1940s
he had already discovered several new species. Through his
efforts, an anemone called Nematostella is now a model for
developmental biology. Hedgpeth, meanwhile, had long before
settled on pycnogonids, an order of rickety-legged marine
organisms commonly known as sea spiders. As Hedgpeth
remembered it, Light never quite approved of him; when he
showed Light a poem he had written about sea spiders, Light
told him, "You must be severely depressed."
Hedgpeth wrote prolifically and eloquently: Welsh poetry,
monographs on Antarctic sea spiders and "Seashore Life of
the San Francisco Bay Region," a slim and charming guide for
the lay reader. He edited the third and fourth editions of
"Between Pacific Tides," a compendium on intertidal life.
Under Hedgpeth, "Tides" became the bible for West Coast
biologists and he their de facto leader. His pen was his
harpoon: an outspoken environmentalist (uncommon for an
academic biologist of the midcentury), Hedgpeth regularly
railed against water mismanagement and habitat destruction.
His barrage of letters and critical essays helped defeat a
famous attempt by Pacific Gas and Electric to build a
nuclear power plant near the site of the Bodega Marine Lab
where Hand would later work. "You didn't want to get into an
argument with Joel, because he knew more than you did," said
Jim Carlton, a marine biologist at the Williams
College-Mystic Seaport Maritime Studies Program, in Mystic,
Conn.
Taxonomy is dwindling and its members aging, as universities
and museums cut financing for this unglamorous and essential
science. Yet Hand and Hedgpeth were perhaps even more
valuable as generalists than as specialists. They knew the
old literature and grasped areas of biology well beyond
their own. Such species, too, are increasingly rare; some
science journals now prohibit authors from citing papers
more than five years old. Even in his heyday, Hedgpeth
sensed the rising water. "So many things are being
investigated and written about that it is no longer possible
for one person, even with several colors of filing cards, to
keep up with it all," he wrote in 1962, in his preface to
the fourth edition of "Between Pacific Tides." "It is this
flood of published material, as much as the passing of the
years, that leaves me feeling like Ishmael, alone to tell
the tale."