The Iowa Lakeside Laboratory: A Century of Discovering the Nature of Nature

A Brief History of Field Stations

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 11 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • a brief history of field stations biological fi el d s t ati ons are generally land-based operations with an infrastructure that supports teaching and/or research programs. Field stations originated when professors realized they could not authentically teach or research the biology of sea life from a classroom or laboratory hundreds of miles from the ocean. Many of the first field stations were European and marine, situated on coasts. In the 1830s a handful of Swedish naturalists established “an impromptu summer biological station” (Jack 1945, 9). A decade after, in 1843, Pierre-Joseph van Beneden founded what is now considered the world’s first true biological station, the research-based Dune Laboratory in Ostend, Belgium. Later, in 1859 the College of France at Concarneau established the Laboratory of Marine Zoology and Physiology, which was also research oriented, on the coast of Brittany. In 1873 Harvard’s Louis Agassiz created the first field station in North America, the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island off the coast of Massachusetts. At about the same time, Anton Dohrn founded the prestigious Zoological Station of Naples. The biological station idea spread swiftly and in many directions to eventually embrace all habitats, not just coastal regions; field stations tend to be located near or within unique habitats or in regions where biodiversity is high and easily accessible, although ships of exploration, such as Darwin’s Beagle, also have been considered field stations (Wyman, Wallensky , and Baine 2009, 584). By 1880 sixteen biological stations had been established from Sweden and the Black Sea in Europe to Virginia and Illinois in the New World. By 1888 both the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association at Plymouth, England, were in operation. Between 1920 and 1930 alone, seventy new field stations were established (Jack 1945, 12 • a brief history of field stations 10). Today there are more than 1,300 field stations: over 300 in the United States and around 1,000 internationally (Moore 2010, 2). Initial enthusiasm aside, field stations often fail. Prior to the Second World War, roughly ninety stations, or about one quarter of all stations established, had been abandoned—their average lifespan about sixteen years. The most common causes for failure have been the death of the director or founder (Louis Agassiz’s death ended the Anderson School, although Woods Hole arose shortly thereafter), catastrophic fire (the Cornell University Biological Station), direct and indirect effects of war (the Royal Hungarian Marine Biological Station), funding cuts (the Biological Station of the United States Bureau of Fisheries at Woods Hole), personal disagreements over philosophy or control (the Mountain Laboratory of the University of Utah), even marine disasters (the wreckage of the Pourquoi Pas?) (Jack 1945, 11). During the Second World War, field stations struggled. Young men and women who might have populated courses and research positions were overseas or in factories, and wartime budgets were bare-boned. Many stations failed. Postwar participation in biological field stations varied. The surge in students supported by the GI Bill saw interest swell. Then in the mid 1950s the first flush of enthusiasm for the new field of molecular biology saw interest in organismal biology, and as a consequence interest in field stations, wane. Interest was rekindled in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the birthing of the environmental movement. Field station enrollments again waned in the 1970s and have generally held steady or been declining since. Richard Bovbjerg’s 1988 report on the status of Lakeside Lab commented on this enrollment decrease : “Across the land there has been a significant drop in registration at field stations. Some stations have gone under. The average registration drop over 10 years has been 40 percent. The same has been true at our station. This correlates with drops in graduate student numbers in the parent universities” (9). And despite the wide and varied nature of global environmental problems and the ability of field stations to address these problems, this is pretty much where we stand today (Whitesell, Lilieholm, and Sharik 2002, 13). Knowing this, it is easy to become pessimistic because not only are field stations different places to study, they also produce a different type of student (Hodder 2009, 670). Undergraduate students on campus learn a brief history of field stations • 13 within a system. They are given books or website URLs...