The last portion of Beebe's journey took him to China, from which they made an unplanned visit to Japan to escape a riot as well as a surge of bubonic plague .[79] When the plague and riots had subsided, Beebe returned to China to document the local pheasant species, then made a second visit to Japan to study pheasants kept in the Imperial Preserves there. In Japan, Beebe was given two cranes by the Imperial Household in exchange for a pair of swans , which were unknown in Japan.[80]
His expedition was completed after a total of 17 months, Beebe and Blair crossed the Pacific to
Blair's departure came as a shock to Beebe, and he was severely depressed for more than a year afterward.[89] Despite her assistance during the pheasant expedition, Beebe excised any mention of her from the monograph he was preparing based on the data gathered during it.[91]
By the end of 1914, Beebe's pheasant monograph was essentially complete in the manuscript. While the text was written by Beebe, the illustrations were provided by several artists: Robert Bruce Horsfall, who had accompanied Beebe on the expedition, painted the environmental scenes for the illustrations' backgrounds, while the pheasants themselves were painted by other artists including George Edward Lodge , Charles R. Knight , and Louis Agassiz Fuertes .[92] Due to the elaborate nature of the book's color artwork, no American publisher was considered capable of reproducing it. The publisher which Beebe chose for his work was George Witherby and Sons of London, as a result of their success publishing the artwork of John James Audubon .[93] The reproduction of the illustrations themselves was to be handled by several companies in Germany and Austria . Reproductions of the illustrations were in the process of being printed when World War I began, holding up the completion of the project for the next four years.[94]
The establishment of the Kalacoon research station enabled Beebe to research the ecology of the surrounding jungle in far more detail than had been possible during his earlier expeditions. Using Kalacoon as his base of operations, Beebe performed a novel type of study: methodically dissecting a small area of jungle, and all of the animals which inhabit it, from the top of the canopy to below the ground. In a second study, Beebe performed the same task for a much larger area of jungle, approximately a quarter-mile (0.4 km) square.[99] During his first season at Kalacoon in 1916, Beebe brought back 300 living specimens for the zoo. This time he succeeded at capturing a hoatzin, the bird that he had narrowly missed during his earlier trip to Guiana, although he was unable to keep it alive for the zoo during the trip back to New York.
Beebe was eager to serve in World War I, but at 40 he was considered too old for regular service. With Roosevelt's help, he secured a post-training American pilot for a flight squadron on Long Island . His training work was halted when, veering to avoid a photographer who had run in front of his airplane as he landed, he crashed on landing and severely injured his right wrist.[101] During a second trip to Kalacoon while his wrist healed, Beebe was further devastated to discover that due to wartime demand for rubber, the entire jungle surrounding the house had been clear-cut to make room for rubber trees. Since the purpose of Kalacoon station had been to study the jungle, the jungle's destruction left Beebe with no choice but to close the station and return with its supplies to New York.[102] [103] Combined with his earlier loss of Blair, the effect of losing Kalacoon plunged Beebe into depression. This did not go unnoticed by Beebe's mentor Osborn, who expressed concern about it in a letter to Madison Grant , writing "I find that he is worried and far from well. [...] Without telling him so, we must take care of him."[104]
In October 1917, Beebe had his opportunity to serve in the war. With the help of a letter of recommendation from Roosevelt, he was given the duty of flying
Beebe's position in the Zoological Society changed in 1918: He was given the title of Honorary Curator of Birds and was made the director of the newly created Department of Tropical Research.[103] With his new position, Beebe no longer had the duty of caring for the zoo's animals, freeing him to devote himself fully to his writing and research.[108] Beebe's duties as curator were passed to Lee Crandall , the former Assistant Curator who had worked under Beebe,[109] although Crandall continued to rely on Beebe for help treating illness in birds, and caring for the exotic birds brought back from Beebe's expeditions.[108]
The first volume of Beebe's pheasant monograph was published that fall, although the ongoing war made it unclear when the remaining three volumes would be published. The first volume was highly praised by reviewers, and received the
In 1919, Osborn helped secure Beebe a new research station in Guiana to replace Kalacoon: Beebe was offered Kartabo Point, an outpost of a New York-based mining corporation.[115] Beebe was enthusiastic about the new station, and it proved very successful for conducting the same detailed analyses of wildlife within small areas that had been performed at Kalacoon.[116] At Kartabo Beebe discovered the phenomenon known as an ant mill , a column of ants following itself in an endless loop until nearly all of them died of exhaustion.[117] [118]
New York Times top ten list for several months.
[126]
In 1924, Beebe went on another expedition to his Guiana research station of Kartabo, intending to continue the detailed documentation of the tropical ecosystem that he had begun at Kalacoon. The paper which finally resulted from this study was published in Zoologica in 1925 and was the first study of its kind in the developing field of tropical ecology .[127] Beebe continued to battle depression during this trip to Kartabo, both over his earlier loss of Blair, and over the death of his mother Nettie, who had died shortly before the beginning of the expedition.[128]
Despite his ongoing research in Guiana, what Beebe desired most was to return to the Galápagos, this time with a properly fitted-out scientific research vessel that possessed the ability to dredge animals from beneath the ocean.bioluminescent animals they hoped to encounter.
[134]
The Arcturus did not encounter the thick mats of sargassum in the Sargasso Sea that Beebe was hoping to study, but Beebe and his crew experienced great success dredging creatures from the sea off the coast of Saint Martin and
Volcanoes of western Albemarle/Isabella Island, where William Beebe observed a volcanic eruption in 1925 Anchoring near Darwin Bay, Beebe made his first attempt at studying sea animals in their native environment by descending into the ocean in a diving helmet .[137] Beebe continued to perform helmet dives throughout his Galápagos expedition, documenting several previously unknown sea animals.[138] In addition to his helmet dives, Beebe applied the same method of research that he had pioneered in the tropics to a small area of ocean, sailing in circles around it for ten days to document all actions and interactions of marine life within that area. This study yielded a collection of 3,776 fish of 136 species, many of them also new to science.[139]
While anchored off the Galápagos, Beebe and his crew noticed
Albemarle Island, and set out to investigate it. Anchoring in a small cove, Beebe and his assistant
John Tee-Van searched for an active crater where they could observe the eruption and were nearing exhaustion by the time they found one. As he observed the crater, Beebe realized that the air surrounding it was filled with noxious gases, and narrowly avoided suffocation before staggering away from it.
[140] Observing the eruption from his ship for another two days, as well as again at a later point in the expedition, Beebe recorded how numerous birds and marine animals were killed after either failing to escape the lava or drawing too close to it in an attempt to scavenge other animals that had died.
[141]
During the return from the Galápagos through the Sargasso Sea, Beebe once again failed to find the thick mats of Sargassum whose study had been one of the primary goals of the expedition. Searching for a way to satisfy his expedition's donors, Beebe hit upon the idea of documenting the marine life of the Hudson Gorge just beyond the shore of New York City. Applying the same techniques to studying the Hudson Gorge that he had used in the Galápagos, Beebe encountered a surprising variety of sea animals, many of which had previously been thought to be exclusive to the tropics.[142]
Shortly after Beebe's return from this expedition, Anthony Kuser requested that Beebe produce a condensed, popular version of his pheasant monograph.[143] The book which resulted from this, titled Pheasants: Their Lives and Homes (also known by the title Pheasants of the World ), was released in 1926 and received the John Burroughs Medal .[144] [145] During the course of writing this book, Beebe was reminded of many experiences during the pheasant expedition which he had not included in his original monograph, and wrote an additional book titled Pheasant Jungles about his adventures during this expedition.[143] While A Monograph of the Pheasants had been a factual account of this expedition, Pheasant Jungles was a somewhat fictionalized account, in which Beebe altered some aspects of his experience to appeal to a wider audience.[146]
Haiti and Bermuda
In 1927, Beebe went on an expedition to Haiti to document its marine life. Anchoring his ship the Lieutenant in the harbor of Port-au-Prince , he performed over 300 helmet dives examining the area's coral reefs and classifying the fish that inhabited them.[147] These dives involved several technological innovations: a watertight brass box which could be used to house a camera for underwater photography, and a telephone which was incorporated into the diving helmet, allowing the diver to dictate observations to someone on the surface instead of having to take notes underwater.[148] Within a hundred days, Beebe and his team had created a catalog of species inhabiting the area nearly as long as what had been assembled on the neighboring island of Puerto Rico in the past four hundred years. In 1928 Beebe and Tee-Van published an illustrated and annotated list of 270 such species, which was expanded in 1935 bringing the total to 324.[149] Beebe provided an account of this expedition in his 1928 book Beneath Tropic Seas , which was the first of his books to receive less than enthusiastic reviews, due to its episodic structure.[150]
As he gained experience with helmet diving, Beebe soon became an enthusiastic advocate of it, believing it to be something that should be experienced by everyone who had the opportunity to do so.[151] He later went so far as to suggest that beachfront homes would someday contain their own underwater gardens, to be experienced with the help of diving helmets:
If you wish to make a garden, choose some beautiful slope or reef grotto and with a hatchet chop and pry off coral boulders with waving purple sea-plumes and golden sea-fans and great particolored anemones. Wedge these into crevices, and in a few days, you will have a sunken garden in a new and miraculous sense. As birds collect about the luxuriant growths of a garden in the upper air, so hosts of fish will follow your labors, great crabs and starfish will creep thither, and now and then fairy jellyfish will throb past, superior in beauty to anything in the upper world, more delicate and graceful than any butterfly.[152]
By this point in his life Beebe was developing a close friendship with Helen Ricker, an American
romance novelist who went by the pen name of
Elswyth Thane , who had met Beebe in 1925. Very little of their early correspondence survives, but Elswyth had idolized Beebe for years, and her first novel
Riders of the Wind was devoted to him. The novel was an account of a young woman who falls in love with and eventually marries, a much older adventurer who strongly resembled Beebe.
[153] [154] Beebe and Elswyth were married on September 22, 1927, when Beebe was 50. Due to Elswyth's tendency to misrepresent her age, conflicting accounts exist of how old she was when she and Beebe were married,
[155] ranging from 23
[91] to 28.
[155] Elswyth and Beebe had an
open marriage , in which neither expected sexual exclusivity from the other so long as their life together was not damaged.
[156]
Although Riders of the Wind was partially based on Beebe's pheasant expedition,[157] Elswyth did not enjoy Beebe's current research.[150] She disliked the heat of the tropics and was unwilling to go with Beebe to Kartabo. As a compromise, Beebe decided to continue his marine research in Bermuda , where she and Beebe had spent their honeymoon.[158] Bermuda's governor Louis Bols introduced Beebe to Prince George , who was fascinated by Beebe's books, and Prince George persuaded Beebe to take him helmet diving. Governor Bols and Prince George subsequently offered Beebe Nonsuch Island , a 25-acre (0.10 km2 ) island off the east coast of Bermuda, for use as a research station.[159]
With the financial help of his sponsors, Beebe planned to use his new research station on Nonsuch Island to conduct a thorough study of an 8-mile (13 km) square area of ocean, documenting every living thing they could find from the surface to a depth of 2 miles (3.2 km).[160] However, Beebe's ability to research the deep ocean using these methods was constrained by the inherent limitations of dredging, which could only provide an incomplete picture of the animals living there. Beebe compared the knowledge that could be gained of the deep ocean from dredging to what a visitor from Mars could learn about a fog-shrouded earthly city by using a dredge to pick up bits of debris from a street.[161] Beebe began planning to create an underwater exploration device, which he could use to descend into the depths and observe these environments directly.[162] The New York Times carried articles describing Beebe's plans, which called for a diving bell with the shape of a cylinder.[163] [164]
These articles caught the attention of Otis Barton , an engineer who had long admired Beebe and who had his own ambition to become a deep-sea explorer. Barton was convinced that Beebe's design for a diving vessel would never be capable of withstanding the extreme pressure of the deep ocean,[165] and with the help of a friend who arranged a meeting with Beebe, proposed an alternative design to him. Barton's design called for a spherical vessel, which was the strongest possible shape for resisting high pressure.[166] Barton had the good fortune that years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had proposed a similar idea to Beebe, and Beebe approved of Barton's design. Beebe and Barton made a deal: Barton would pay for the sphere and all of the other equipment to go with it. In return, Beebe would pay for other expenses such as chartering a ship to raise and lower the sphere, and as the owner of the sphere, Barton would accompany Beebe on his expeditions in it.[167] Beebe named their vessel the Bathysphere , from the Greek prefix bathy- meaning "deep" combined with "sphere".[168]
Work at Nonsuch Island
From 1930 to 1934, Beebe and Barton used the Bathysphere to conduct a series of dives of increasing depth off the coast of Nonsuch Island, becoming the first people to observe deep-sea animals in their native environment.[169] The Bathysphere was lowered into the ocean using a steel cable, and a second cable carried a phone line which the Bathysphere's occupants used to communicate with the surface, as well as an electrical cable for a searchlight to illuminate animals outside the Bathysphere.[170] Beebe's observations were relayed up the phone line to be recorded by Gloria Hollister ,[171] his chief technical associate who was also in charge of preparing specimens obtained from dredging.[172] Beebe and Barton made a total of 35 dives in the Bathysphere,[173] setting several consecutive world records for the deepest dive ever performed by a human.[169] The record set by the deepest of these, to a depth of 3,028 feet (923 m) on August 15, 1934, lasted until it was broken by Barton in 1949.[174]
In 1931, Beebe and Barton's Bathysphere dives were interrupted for a year due to technical problems and uncooperative weather. An additional difficulty in 1931 was the death of Beebe's father, and Beebe left Nonsuch Island for a week to attend his father's funeral.National Geographic, and from an
NBC radio broadcast in which Beebe's voice transmitted up the phone line from inside the Bathysphere was broadcast nationally over the radio.
[178]
Although Beebe attempted to ensure that Barton would receive credit as the Bathysphere's inventor and Beebe's fellow diver, the popular media tended to ignore Barton and pay attention only to Beebe.[179] Barton was often resentful of this, believing Beebe to be deliberately hogging the fame.[180] Beebe in turn lacked patience for Barton's unpredictable moods and felt that Barton did not display the proper respect for the natural world.[181] Still, Beebe and Barton both had something the other needed: Beebe for his experience as a marine biologist and Barton for his mechanical skill.[182] Out of pragmatic concern for the success of their lives, they managed to resolve their disagreements well enough to work together at Nonsuch Island,[183] although they did not remain on good terms afterward.[184]
Likely, Beebe became romantically involved with Hollister during his work at Nonsuch Island. An entry in Beebe's personal journal, written in a secret code that he used when describing things he wished kept secret, reads "I kissed her [Gloria] and she loves me."[185] [186] It is unclear whether Elswyth knew of Beebe's affair with Gloria, but if she did she appears to not have minded it. In addition to the open nature of their marriage, Elswyth described in a 1940s interview with Today's Woman magazine that she enjoyed the knowledge that Beebe was attractive to women.[187]
Beebe continued to conduct marine research after 1934, but he felt that he had seen what he wanted to see using the Bathysphere and that further drives were too expensive for whatever knowledge he gained from them to be worth the cost.[188] With the help of Beebe's friend the physician Henry Lloyd, Beebe conducted an expedition in the West Indies examining the stomach contents of tuna , which uncovered previously unknown larval forms of several species of fish.[189] Shortly after returning, Beebe set out on a longer expedition to the waters around Baja California , financed by the Californian businessman Templeton Crocker on board his yacht the Zaca . The goal of this expedition was to study the area's undersea fauna utilizing dredging and helmet diving, and Beebe and his team were surprised by the diversity of animals that they encountered there.[190] In 1937 Beebe went on a second expedition aboard the Zaca , documenting the native wildlife along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Colombia . During this expedition, rather than focusing on either sea animals as he had at Nonsuch Island or on birds as he had earlier in his life, he attempted to document all aspects of the ecosystem.[191] Beebe described his two expeditions onboard the Zaca in his books Zaca Venture and The Book of Bays , in which he emphasized his concern for threatened habitats and his dismay at human destruction.[192]
During the two Zaca expeditions Beebe was accompanied by his longtime assistant John Tee-Van as well as
carcinologist who had first worked for Beebe at Nonsuch Island in 1932,
[193] and who would subsequently be among Beebe's most cherished associates for the rest of his life.
[194] Like Hollister before her, Crane would eventually become Beebe's lover during the long expeditions that Beebe made without Elswyth's companionship.
[195] During this time Beebe was also forming a close friendship with
Winnie-the-Pooh 's creator
A. A. Milne , who wrote of
Half Mile Down "I don't know which I envy you most: all those moral and physical qualities which you have and I lack, or all that wonder of a new world. [...] One of the few things in the world of which I am really proud is that I know Will Beebe."
[196]
Return to the tropics
Although Beebe continued to use Nonsuch Island as his base of operations throughout the 1930s, with the onset of World War II in 1939 it was announced that the ferry linking Bermuda to New York would soon be making its final run, requiring Beebe and his team to hastily abandon their station there.[197] Transportation to and from Bermuda resumed in 1940, and Beebe returned there in May 1941, but the environment was slowly being transformed due to the war. A large number of military ships made docking difficult, most of the island's reefs were being destroyed to construct an airfield, and the combination of construction activity and pollution made observing the sea life impossible. Appalled by the destruction, Beebe finally rented his station at Nonsuch Island to a military contractor and returned to New York.[198]
With the loss of their station in Bermuda, Beebe and Elswyth gave up on their compromise of finding a research station where they could both be happy. Elswyth, who was most content in temperate environments, began searching for a home in New England where she could continue her writing. Meanwhile, Beebe began searching for a new tropical research station to replace Kartabo, which had fallen victim to deforestation just like Kalacoon before it.[199] Beebe eventually helped Elswyth purchase a small farm near Wilmington, Vermont , where he visited her frequently. Elswyth explained in a magazine interview that she was uncomfortable on Beebe's expeditions, so the two of them had agreed that they would keep their careers separate from their private lives.[200]
With the financial assistance of
rhinoceros beetles using their horns in competition between males, proving that their horns were an adaptation for sexual selection rather than for defense against predators.
[203] Although Beebe's research at Caripito was productive, he felt that the extremity of its wet-dry cycle made it impractical as a research station,
[204] and the expanding oil operations in the region were in danger of destroying the local environment.
[202] For these reasons, Beebe did not return to Caripito after his first season there.
[204]
c. 1960
In the spring of 1944, Jocelyn Crane returned to Venezuela to search for a location for a new field station to replace the one at Caripito. The location that she found, known as Rancho Grande, had initially been intended as a palace for Venezuela's dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in the Henri Pittier National Park . The palace's construction had been left unfinished after Gómez's death, and since then the building's vast corridors and ballrooms had become the home of jaguars , tapirs and sloths .[205] Unlike Beebe's other tropical research stations, which had been located in lowland regions, Rancho Grande was located on a mountainside in what Beebe described as "the ultimate cloud jungle".[206] Creole Petroleum , a Venezuelan spin-off of Standard, agreed to cover the cost of the station and finished a small portion of the vast structure for Beebe and his team to use. Beebe and his team began work there in 1945, staying as guests of the Venezuelan government.[205]
Rancho Grande was located at a mountain pass in a branch of the
Although Beebe and his team enjoyed rewarding seasons at Rancho Grande in 1945 and 1946, they did not return there in 1947. The reason they gave in their annual report was that the previous two seasons had produced so much material that they needed an additional year to analyze it, but in reality, this was more the result of insufficient funding as well as the unstable state of Venezuelan politics. Beebe returned to Rancho Grande in 1948, where he completed several technical papers about the migration patterns of birds and insects, as well as a comprehensive study of the area's ecology which he coauthored with Jocelyn Crane. Realizing that the area's politics might soon put an end to their research there, in spring of 1948 Jocelyn made a side trip to Trinidad and Tobago in hope of finding a site for a research station where the politics would be more secure.[210] Finally, when the 1948 Venezuelan coup d'état installed Marcos Pérez Jiménez as Venezuela's dictator, Beebe decided that he could no longer continue to work in Venezuela.[211] Beebe described his experiences at Rancho Grande in his 1949 book High Jungle , which was the last of Beebe's major books.[212]
In January 1950, the New York Zoological Society celebrated to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Beebe's work for them.Harvard biologist
Ernst Mayr wrote that Beebe's work had been an inspiration to his own, particularly
A Monograph of the Pheasants and Beebe's books about jungle wildlife.
[215]
Final years in Trinidad and Tobago
The product of Jocelyn Crane's search for a potential research station in Trinidad and Tobago was a house on a hill overlooking the Arima Valley, which was known as Verdant Vale.[216] In 1949, Beebe bought this estate to use a permanent research station to replace Rancho Grande. Beebe renamed the estate Simla, after the hill in India that featured in Rudyard Kipling 's writings.[194] [217] He later described the sense of destiny that marked his introduction to the estate:
We had climbed the winding road in a tropical downpour. As we came out below the outermost wall, the sun broke through, three house wrens sang at once, and a double rainbow sprayed the valley with infrared and ultraviolet. We would not have been human if we had refused to recognize omens.[217]
At Simla Beebe and his team worked closely together with Asa and Newcome Wright, the owners of the adjacent Spring Hill estate, who provided accommodations for them while water and electricity were connected at Simla.[218] Although the initial purchase of Simla had contained only the house and 22 acres (0.089 km2 ) of the forest surrounding it, Beebe soon realized that this was insufficient for the research he wished to conduct, and purchased another neighboring estate known as St. Pat's which contained an additional 170 acres (0.69 km2 ).[219] In 1953, Beebe donated both properties to the New York Zoological Society for one dollar,[211] giving him the position of one of the society's "Benefactors in Perpetuity".[220]
Research at Simla formally began in 1950.[221] Beebe's research at Simla combined elements of many different earlier stages of his research, including observations of the life cycles of the area's birds, detailed analyses of every plant and animal in small areas of forest, and studies of insect behavior.[222] Insects were the focus of the scientific papers he produced during this period, marking a transition from his past areas of study into the field of entomology .[223] Local children periodically brought animal specimens to Beebe at Simla and asked him to classify them. Remembering the early studies of his own childhood, in which he had brought specimens to the American Museum of Natural History, he was happily working with them.[224]
fiddler crabs. Although Jocelyn's studies during this expedition served as part of the basis for her monograph
Fiddler Crabs of the World ,
[228] Beebe never published the results of his own observations during it.
[227]
During Beebe's later years, Simla was an important gathering point for researchers in many other areas of biology. Other biologists who visited to conduct studies there and exchange ideas with Beebe included
ethologist
Konrad Lorenz , entomologist Lincoln Brower, ethologist
Donald Griffin , and ornithologist
David Snow .
[229] Snow became a regular visitor to Simla,
[230] and in return Beebe provided financial assistance for some of Snow's own research.
[231] Beebe devised an unusual method for determining how he would react to his visitors at Simla. His terrace there was decorated with statues of characters from
Winnie-the-Pooh that had been a gift from
A. A. Milne . Visitors who recognized these characters as Milne's creations were greeted by Beebe with enthusiasm, while those who did not recognize them were just endured by Beebe until they left.
[210] [232]
Beebe remained active well into his old age. In 1957, at the age of eighty, he was still capable of climbing slippery tree trunks to study bird nests.Sjögren's syndrome, although lacking a complete understanding of what caused it, Beebe and his doctors referred to it as "mango mouth". Beebe was reluctant to accept speaking engagements because of the effect this had on his voice, although he continued to give lectures on occasion with Jocelyn's help.
[235]
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr. describes how during Beebe's last few years he gradually succumbed to illness, eventually becoming nearly immobile and incapable of speech.
[236] However, Beebe's personal physician A. E. Hill provides a differing account, stating that Beebe remained lucid and able to move about without assistance almost until his last day, apart from the periods of time during which his "mango mouth" temporarily slurred his speech.
[237] Both accounts agree that throughout his final years Beebe remained fond of playing practical jokes on his visitors at Simla,
[237] and retained his sense of humor even within days of his death.
[236]
William Beebe died of pneumonia at Simla on June 4, 1962.[238] [239] According to his wishes, he was buried in Mucurapo Cemetery in Port of Spain . Memorial services were held in both Trinidad and Tobago and New York City so that Beebe's friends in both parts of the world could attend. Following Beebe's death, Jocelyn succeeded him as the director of the Department of Tropical Research and continued to run the Simla station along with the rest of Beebe's former staff.[240]
Beebe had frequently worried that Elswyth would write a biography of him after his death. To prevent this possibility, he left all of his papers and journals to Jocelyn. After Elswyth died in 1984, Jocelyn donated Beebe's papers to the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at
Firestone Library.
[241] Even in the possession of Firestone Library, Beebe's papers remained inaccessible without Jocelyn's permission, and most scholars were prevented from using them until Jocelyn offered access to the writer, Carol Grant Gould, to write Beebe's biography.
[242] The Archives of the
Wildlife Conservation Society also holds several collections related to the Department of Tropical Research.
Personality and cultural image
Vanity Fair in 1933. The illustration's caption reads "Professor Beebe, gourmet, and ichthyologist, secretly fries his discovery instead of pickling it for posterity."
[243] William Beebe was more famous in the United States than any other American naturalist before the days of television.[244] As a scientific writer who participated in both the popular and academic worlds, he occupied a similar role to the role later occupied by Stephen Jay Gould . Beebe was a well-known figure in the Roaring Twenties of New York City and was friends with numerous other well-known figures of the period, including Fannie Hurst and the cartoonist Rube Goldberg .[245] Although he was not physically handsome in the traditional sense, he tended to dominate every social and professional situation due to his enthusiasm, intelligence, and charisma.[246] As a result of his much-publicized divorce from Blair and his later marriage to Elswyth, he was also known for his stormy relationships with women.[245]
Beebe described his religious beliefs as a combination of
eugenic ideas advocated by many biologists in the early 20th century, including some of his contemporaries at the zoo, although this was largely out of fear that these ideas would alienate friends of the zoo and cause divisions among its staff.
[250]
Beebe had a troubled relationship with some of his superiors at the zoo, particularly Hornaday, who was resentful of Beebe's constant demands for more funding and staff, as well as the fact that as Beebe's career progressed he gradually devoted less and less time to care for the zoo itself.[251] One particular point of disagreement was Beebe's forgetfulness about returning books which he had borrowed from the Zoological Society's Library, which would occasionally go missing for years as a result.[252] However, Hornaday never publicly expressed his disagreements with Beebe and did not hesitate to defend Beebe's work when others criticized it.[253]
Beebe had high expectations of the people working under him on all of his expeditions,[254] although he never revealed the exact characteristics that he looked for in potential employees.[255] Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. recounts one incident in which Beebe turned down a scientist who wished to work with him when the scientist described boredom with his current duties as one of his reasons for requesting this. In response to this request, Beebe retorted:
Boredom is immoral. All a man has to do is see . All about us, nature puts on the most thrilling adventure stories ever created, but we have to use our eyes. I was walking across our compound last month when a queen termite began building her miraculous city. I saw it because I was looking down. One night three giant fruit bats flew over the face of the moon. I saw them because I was looking up. To some men, the jungle is a tangled place of heat and danger. But, to the man who can see , its vines and plants form a beautiful and carefully ordered tapestry. No, I don't want any bored men around me.[24]
Beebe nonetheless exhibited a high degree of loyalty to those employees who were capable of meeting his standards. When he felt that the pressure of working under him had become too great, he would announce that his birthday was approaching, and his staff would have several days free from work to celebrate it. On one such occasion, when a scientist working under Beebe whispered to him that he knew it was not in fact Beebe's birthday, Beebe responded "A man should have a birthday when he needs one".[256]
Impact of work and legacy
William Beebe was a pioneer in the field now known as ecology . His theory that organisms must be understood in the context of the ecosystems they inhabit was completely new for its time and has been highly influential.[257] [258] The method he invented of methodically analyzing all organisms within a small area of wilderness has become a standard method in this field.[259] Beebe was also a pioneer in the field of oceanography , setting a precedent with his Bathysphere dives which many other researchers would follow.[260]
E. O. Wilson , Sylvia Earle and Ernst Mayr have all described Beebe's work as an influence on their own choice of careers.[215] [249] Among the most significant of Beebe's influences on other researchers was Rachel Carson , who regarded Beebe as both a friend and an inspiration.[261] Carson dedicated her 1951 book The Sea Around Us to Beebe, writing "My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe."[258] Due to Beebe's renewed emphasis on field research at a time when laboratory studies were becoming the dominant trend in biology, more recent field researchers such as Jane Goodall and George Schaller are also sometimes considered his intellectual descendants.[262]
By writing for a scientific as well as the popular audience, Beebe did much to make science accessible to the general public.[114] [263] This was particularly significant in the area of conservation , of which he was one of the most important early advocates.[47] With his many writings about the dangers of environmental destruction, Beebe helped to raise public awareness about this topic.[264] However, Beebe's prolific writing for a popular audience had a downside, in that other scientists of his time were reluctant to hold him in high accord because they regarded him as a popularizer .[114]
During the course of his career, Beebe authored over 800 articles and 21 books, including his four-volume pheasant monograph. He had a total of 64 animals named after him, and he described one new species of bird and 87 species of fish (see Category:Taxa named by William Beebe ). While 83 of the fish that he described were done so in a conventional manner, the remaining four were done so based on visual observations.[263]
A lingering controversy exists in
type specimen, something which was obviously impossible from inside the Bathysphere.
[266] Some of Beebe's critics claimed that these fish were illusions resulting from condensation on the Bathysphere's window, or even that Beebe willfully made them up, although the latter would have been strongly at odds with Beebe's reputation as an honest and rigorous scientist.
[267] While many of Beebe's observations from the Bathysphere have since been confirmed by advances in undersea photography,
[226] it is unclear whether others fit the description of any known sea animal.
[268] One possibility is that although these animals indeed exist, so much remains to be discovered about life in the deep ocean that these animals have yet to be seen by anyone other than him.
[269]
In addition to his descriptions of new taxa, the crab Leptuca beebei (Crane , 1941) , commonly known as Beebe's fiddler crab, was named in his honor.[270]
Tetrapteryx
See also:
The Origin of Birds (book)
Beebe's illustration of "Tetrapteryx"
Along with his analysis of pheasant
vestiges of leg-wings on one of the specimens of
Archaeopteryx . Beebe described his idea in a 1915 paper published in
Zoologica , titled "A Tetrapteryx Stage in the Ancestry of Birds".
[271]
The Origin of Birds. Heilmann examined hatchlings of many other bird species, both closely related to those studied by Beebe and belonging to more primitive species, in hope of finding additional evidence for the leg-wings which Beebe had documented. After failing to find such evidence, Heilmann ultimately rejected Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis, and this remained the consensus among ornithologists for the next several decades.
[272] Beebe, however, continued to advance his Tetrapteryx hypothesis as late as the 1940s.
[273]
In 2003, Beebe's Tetrapteryx hypothesis was supported by the discovery of Richard O. Prum has described as "[looking] as if it could have glided straight out of the pages of Beebe’s notebooks."
[275] This animal's discovery has had the effect of resurrecting Beebe's theory that leg feathers played an important role in the origin of bird flight.
[276]
William Beebe Tropical Research Station
Following William Beebe's death in 1962, his research station at Simla remained in operation under Jocelyn Crane's management,[277] under the new name of the William Beebe Tropical Research Station.[278] However, because Jocelyn's research required her to travel north for extended periods, by 1965 she had little time to keep the station running.[279] By 1971, the station had fallen into disuse and was declared closed.[280] Meanwhile, as Asa Wright's health began to fail in her old age, her friends began to fear that after her death her neighboring estate of Spring Hill might be lost to developers and established a trust to buy the estate and convert it into the Asa Wright nature center.[281] In 1974, Beebe's property was donated to the newly established Asa Wright Nature Center.[282]
Now under the management of the Asa Wright Nature Center, the William Beebe Tropical Research Station has gradually been renovated. It is now once again actively involved in research and an important gathering place for scientists.oilbirds that William Beebe studied decades earlier.
[279]
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Further reading
"William Beebe," in Tom Taylor and Michael Taylor, Aves: A Survey of the Literature of Neotropical Ornithology , Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Libraries, 2011.
External links