Pioneering Amateurs
From Microcosm Aquarium Explorer
A Space of Consequence: Where Hobby Meets Science
By Ret Talbot
When Stephen King became the 2003 recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, it created a stir. The winners are usually not authors of bestseller genre fiction.
“I salute the National Book Foundation Board, who took a huge risk in giving this award to a man many people see as a rich hack,” he said in his acceptance speech. “For far too long the so-called popular writers of this country and the so-called literary writers have stared at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding.”
Some serious marine aquarists I know feel a bit like Stephen King in the presence of the so-called scientific establishment. While there are certainly those marine scientists who are avid hobbyists and enthusiastic collaborators across paradigms, there are also many in the scientific community who don’t think they have a whole lot to learn from a hobbyist hack “rich enough” to keep a stunning marine aquarium.
“We can build bridges between the popular and the literary if we keep our minds and hearts open,” said Stephen King near the end of his speech, and that is the spirit in which I offer my thoughts herein.
[edit] Bringing the Sea Indoors
I firmly believe that building bridges between advanced hobbyists and established scientists will benefit both the hobby and the science, and, in my way of thinking, it is a very worthwhile endeavor indeed.
This is nothing new, of course. Consider Anne Constantia Beresford Thynne. She became “the woman who brought the sea to the city” in 1846, when she conveyed a stone jar filled with seawater and a few stony corals from the coast to her home in London. Anna, as she was known to her family and friends, transferred the corals to two glass bowls and devised a system for keeping the water aerated and “nourished.” This, in short, made her the first successful marine aquarist, at least insofar as we have come to understand the term today.
But how did Anna come to be the first successful marine hobbyist? The answer is quite simple, actually. While we may have a magazine called Popular Science today, in Anna’s time, science was actually popular. Anna came to the marine aquarium hobby as a result of her interest in collecting coral fossils—a fashionable Victorian hobby spurred by a burst of scientific activity (like Darwin’s 1842 text on coral reefs) that captured the public’s imagination.
[edit] The Lady & The Live Rock
Popular scientific literature inspired people like Anna, a mother of eight, to passionately engage in scientific inquiry and in-depth experimentation. For example, Philip Henry Gosse, the self-taught naturalist and writer of popular scientific literature, published his heavily illustrated The Ocean in 1844. The book was devoured by a populous hanging in the balance between revolutionary spirit and spiritual revolution.
Is it really that surprising that two summers later, Anna was collecting live corals from the tidepools of Tourquay to bring back home to London?
Scientists of the day may have been conconvinced that Anna was engaged in anything more than an uninformed fascination with strange life forms in the vein of the returning Roman general who brought exotic beasts from the far reaches of the Empire at which the masses could gawk.
Well, consider that in the spring of 1847, Anna sent for “shells and small pieces of rock, to which living sea-weed was attached.” Why? “I wished to try whether I could adjust the balance between animal and vegetable life,” she explains. And balance it she did.
“On these shells,” she records, “were sure to be many zoophytes and other animals, so that I obtained a very various and curious collection of marine creatures. I had a quantity of microscopic corallines, which multiplied very fast; serpulse, that rapidly elongated their stony cases; some nereis, ophiurse, and a great many beautiful little things for which I could find no name.”
[edit] Toward A Confluence of Ideas and Findings
It was Gosse who receive public recognition for keeping the first balanced marine aquarium (1852), being a monumental force behind the world’s first pubic aquarium (1853), and publishing two of the most important texts in the hobby: Aquarium (1854) and A Handbook to the Marine Aquarium (1855), but Anna too was a hobbyist who was making waves.
She continued her experiments and contributed greatly to the available knowledge of the reproductive behaviors of sponges. She entertained a near never-ending procession of some of the most brilliant scientific personalities of the day, each of whom sat in her parlor to look at her aquaria.
And so it was that at the very outset of the marine aquarium hobby, so-called amateurs like Anna and Gosse were creating a consequential space at the intersection of science and hobby. Why not intentionally attempt to recapture some of those halcyon days, or, at the very least, stop “star[ing] at each other with animosity and a willful lack of understanding.”
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