Bodega Marine Lab founder Cadet Hand dies
Posted Dec. 8, 2006 ------- Dr. Cadet H. Hand, Jr passed away at his home in Salmon Creek near Bodega Bay on November 29, 2006 at the age of 86. He is survived by his wife Winifred (married 64 years), and two sons, Skip and his wife Victoria, and Gary.
Cadet was born on Long Island and grew up in Connecticut where he attended the University of Connecticut. His graduate work was done at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his PhD in Zoology in 1951 and to which he returned as a career-long faculty member in 1953.
He was a naturalist specializing in marine invertebrates, particularly sea anemones, and published numerous papers on his research. During his career he studied and worked at many of the important marine and oceanographic institutions in all the states on the US West Coast as well as Woods Hole in Massachusetts. Aside from his regular teaching duties at UC Berkeley, he also taught summer classes at improvised locations at Bodega Bay and Bolinas, California. In the mid 1950's he was a member of a summer-long scientific expedition to Kapingamaringi Atoll in the South Pacific. His Sabbatical years were mostly spent at the Portobello Marine Lab in New Zealand. One Sabbatical included research in Australia with a week or two spent at a biological field station on Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. He also had the rare experience of standing on the South Pole.
About 1960, Pacific Gas and Electricity's attempt to build a nuclear power plant on Bodega Head caused him to become interested in the environmental effects of such installations. Subsequently, he served for more than 20 years, first as an environmental consultant, then as Administrative Judge for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
In 1961 he became the Founding Director of the University of California Bodega Marine Laboratory (BML) at Bodega Bay, CA, and served as BML's director until his retirement in 1985. As Professor Emeritus he continued research at BML until 2003 when he finally closed his lab space there.
For many years he was also an active participant in the Community affairs of the greater Bodega Bay area.
Cadet had a warm, engaging, and playful manner. He was a man who easily made friends from all walks of life including his colleagues around the world, students, neighbors, fishermen, artists, and royalty. While at Hopkins Marine Station near Monterey, he met Ed Ricketts of Steinbeck fame. He exchanged publications with Emperor Hirohito, a Marine Biologist colleague, and eventually met him in San Francisco in 1975. He is quoted as saying about his career, "I enjoyed myself tremendously."
A memorial service for Cadet is being contemplated sometime in 2007 at the Bodega Marine Lab. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Cadet Hand Library at Bodega Marine Laboratory, P.O. Box 247, Bodega Bay CA 94923.
The family has requested no flowers, but letters may be sent to Cadet's wife of 64 years, Wini:
Wini Hand, P. O. Box 1016, Bodega Bay, California 94923.
A brief biography of Cadet's full life - below - was contributed by Jim Carlton and Daphne Fautin
(The beach at Horseshoe Cove with first Lab building in background in 1982. The lobster-culture experiments at BML were in progress while he was Director, but were not his research specialty.)
Professor Cadet Hammond Hand, Jr., founding Director of the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay, California, was a master invertebrate zoologist with an unmatched knowledge of the marine life of the American Pacific coast, and was also one of the world's leading coelenterate biologists. His career, which spanned 60 years, saw many of the great developments in our understanding of hydroids and sea anemones, some of the most common animals in the sea, to which he contributed greatly. A raconteur par excellence, with a striking sense of humor, Cadet commanded a staggering knowledge of the natural history, life history, anatomy, morphology, and biology of thousands of species, and there was hardly a species one could mention where Cadet did not know that extra curiosity or unique relationship.
Cadet's knowledge of mollusks, a life-long interest of his, often equalled that of his expertise in hydroids and sea anemones. Few of his colleagues knew that his first publication (1949), coauthored with a colleague at Mills College in Oakland, was on the feeding biology of the giant banana slug Ariolimax, and other early publications (with colleagues and students) were on slug parasites, cephalocarid crustaceans, and flatworm commensals of marine mollusks. Cadet published for 58 years, a record few achieve; included among his final publications will be his co-authorship of chapters on hydroids and sea anemones in the Fourth Edition of the Light & Smith Manual, the guide to the invertebrates of the California coast, due out in 2007.
Cadet was born on April 23, 1920 on the south shore of Long Island, in the lace-mill town of Patchogue, New York (the Hand family traced its roots back to 1628 on Long Island), but grew up near in Connecticut near the Rhode Island border. An avid life-long fisherman, Cadet would recall his childhood fishing days in grist mill ponds, and that his father would send him down to the Rhode Island shore to collect green crabs for tautog fishing (similarly, in later years, he would speak fondly of steelhead fishing in Salmon Creek and of trout fishing in New Zealand; fittingly, he was presented with fly-fishing and spin-fishing outfits for his retirement gifts). He graduated in 1946 in Biology from the University of Connecticut, where he met his wife Winifred.
He arrived in 1946 at the University of California, Berkeley, to start graduate work under S. F. Light, who encouraged Cadet to undertake doctoral work on the biology and physiology of nereid worms ("pileworms"), advising the young graduate student that taxonomy wasn't popular, and it wouldn't be possible to get a job as a taxonomist. But Cadet became committed to sea anemones in the spring of 1947, seeds that were to launch a long career as one of the world's most respected anemone taxonomists and biologists. Light died unexpectedly in 1947: the late Ralph Smith (1916-1993), who also arrived in Berkeley in 1946, and only four years Cadet's senior, took over as his major professor (Ralph later remarked that his role was to "check the spelling and punctuation" of Cadet's dissertation).
While a Ph.D. student, Cadet was for over 3 years an instructor (including a year as Chair) of zoology at Mills College. After a short stint on the research staff at Scripps for two years starting in 1951 (which included work on sardines), Cadet returned to Berkeley in 1953 as Assistant Professor: he retired as Professor of Zoology (and, below, as Director of the Bodega Marine Laboratory) in 1985, and did not close his office and laboratory at Bodega until May 30, 2003.
Research took him across all of America, to Europe, to the South Pole, to Australia (including the Great Barrier Reef), and several sabbatical trips to one of his favorite spots, the Portobello Marine Biological Station in New Zealand. One of his most enduring memories (for a scientist who remembered almost everything and almost every species he had ever encountered) was a research trip in 1954 to Kapingamarangi Atoll in the Caroline Islands: noting the lack of knowledge of Pacific atolls in World War II, the Office of Naval Research deployed teams of investigators in the early 1950s to the Marshalls, Gilberts, Carolines, and other island groups: as we might say today, Cadet "scored" a trip to the Carolines.
Cadet had many career highlights, any one of which would be the envy of any scientist. We mention below some of many high-water marks. A favorite 45 minutes of Cadet's life occurred on October 9, 1975, when he met with Emperor Hirohito, another one of the world's hydroid specialists, in San Francisco. Cadet was always extremely pleased that the Emperor had asked to see him.
Cadet was a member of a dedicated team of UC Berkeley zoologists who began discussions in the 1950s to seek out a marine biology station for Berkeley: Cadet became the Director of the as-yet unbuilt Bodega Marine Laboratory in 1961, and was to remain so for another quarter century. Cadet's roots were long and deep in the region: he and Wini began vacationing in 1946 in what was then called "Salmon Creek Village", and in the 1960s built their home there. BML opened its doors in 1966 on the outer coast, near Horseshoe Cove on Bodega Head, having weathered the 1960s turmoil both on the Berkeley campus and on Bodega Head itself, as plans for a nuclear power plant mushroomed and then thankfully were eventually abandoned (but not before leaving a 100-foot deep hole in Bodega Head for the nuclear reactor that never was, and not before destroying the very site where Cadet and Don Abbott had stood in the 1950s "dreaming of a marine lab" Campbell Cove, inside the bight of Bodega Harbor). Cadet remained the BML Director until 1985, shepherding the Laboratory's growth in staff, facilities, and programs and its eventual transfer from UC Berkeley to UC Davis in 1983. The library at BML was dedicated in Cadet's name in 1996.
Amongst his research career highlights launched in 1955-1956 with the publication of a monographic treatment of the sea anemones of California we mention three:
In a famous exchange, published in 1956 in the prestigious journal Ecology, with the "Odum brothers", Cadet pondered the source of coral nutrition. Two years later, Cadet and one of his first Ph.D. students, Len Muscatine, were the first to demonstrate, using the sea anemone Anthopleura as a model, that much of the carbon fixed by symbiotic microalgae (zooxanthellae) was translocated to the host animal (27 years later, Len was the official speaker on symbiotic algae -- at the University seminar in Cadet's honor upon his retirement).
In the mid-1950s, Cadet was the first to report the salt-marsh "starlet" sea anemone Nematostella in California: nearly 40 years later, he, along with his student Kevin Uhlinger, returned to Nematostella, producing 3 important papers, suggesting that it could serve as a model animal for developmental biology. In his retirement, Cadet would proudly show visitors the dishes and bowls in his lab filled with Nematostella. Earlier this year, he spoke with great interest -- and indeed pride -- that a genomic database was being built for one of his favorite marine animals, based in no small part on the interest that he had revitalized in this superb animal.
A zoologist of classical training and boundless perception, Cadet bathed in the luxury of vindication in his final months: in 1955, he proposed that the mysterious animal Tetraplatia, although looking like a tiny worm but long before established as some sort of coelenterate, was specifically in the Class Hydrozoa and more specifically a member of the hydrozoan group Narcomedusae, and, even more, most closely related to the family Aeginidae. The detail here is important. In 1960, a British scientist, Patricia Ralph, announced that Tetraplatia was in fact in an entirely different class, the Scyphozoa -- the jellyfish a matter of some embarrassment to Cadet, who considered it a "black mark" on his record.
It is thus hard to imagine how pleased Cadet was when he learned in early 2006 that the Smithsonian's Allen Collins and colleagues concluded, based on molecular genetic evidence, that Tetraplatia was indeed a hydrozoan and a member of the Narcomedusae and most closely related to the Aeginidae!. The final words of the acknowledgements in the paper by Collins et al. read, "We are especially grateful to Cadet Hand for writing such an inspiring and insightful paper ...". Cadet was tickled beyond words.
Cadet taught invertebrate zoology to undergraduate and graduate students for decades, starting at the Hopkins Marine Station in the late 1940s in Pacific Grove, and through the 1950s and 1960s at Berkeley. A nostalgic few years in the mid-1950s were summers at the predecessor of the Bodega Marine Laboratory, the "Foggy Bottom Lab", a rented shed on the shore in the town of Bodega Bay, which Cadet and Ralph Smith operated for summer programs: for the rest of their lives, both Cadet and Ralph would refer to Foggy Bottom's "running seawater system", which consisted of students running with buckets of seawater from the shore to the shed. Cadet produced over two dozen Ph.D. students (most of whom are shown in the Ph.D.logenetic tree published in 1988 in The Veliger, 31: 135-138; to this tree we add Jon Geller and Rich Everett, and (as co-advisor with Roy Caldwell) Nanette Chadwick), and many master's students. All remember his distinctive handwriting, a form of block-letters, learned as a draftsman in an airplane factory in World War II that, and his flourishing signature, with a bold "C" and a bold "t", signing off what was, without exception, a vignette to treasure.
Cadet Hand was a teacher, advisor, colleague, champion, and guide to us and to literally thousands of other academic children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren ..... and his lineage will continue ad infinitum. He set the bar for reminding us all to be the complete zoologist: that to command all aspects of a species' life, to understand how that species fits into the economy of nature, and to share that knowledge with inspiration and enthusiasm with others, was the sine qua non of a life well spent.
Cadet passed away at his home in Salmon Creek on November 29, 2006. In addition to Wini, he is survived by his two sons, Skip and his wife Victoria, and Gary.
-- Jim Carlton and Daphne Fautin
Cadet is aboard what is probably one of the BML's research vessels earlier than 1985.
Another colleague of Cadet Hand contributes memories:
Posted Dec. 5, 2006 -------- To exorcise the sadness of the bad news I received today, I am writing my memories about Cadet Hand. It is not a biography, it is a report of my relationship with him. The way I knew him and what he meant to me. Probably it will mean nothing to the rest of you, but I have nobody else to write to. And I will feel better after this exercise.
I went to California in 1981, because I accompanied my grandmother to see her sisters who emigrated in the US in the Twenties. Most of them were in Chicago (those were the days of Al Capone), but one was in San Francisco (the name of my grandmother is Ottavia, she was the 8th of a large batch, she is still alive, 100 year old). And there I went, to San Francisco. I knew that Bodega Bay was a good place for hydroids, there were Cadet Hand, John Rees and Claudia Mills who worked or had worked there, so I imagined that it was a good place to visit. Since I was starting my studies on these beasts. I rented a car and there I drove. I showed up unexpected. Cadet was playing at a water table with some anemones. He showed me around, as if he knew me since a long time and my visit was expected. If you study cnidarians you are part of the family, he said. I spent two hours with him. And I said to myself that I wanted to spend some more time at that place, directed by such a nice guy. I applied for a grant and spent from February to Spetember 1983 at the Bodega Marine Lab. Cadet wrote all the letters that were required by the financing agency. When I arrived there he loaned me a car until I found a second-hand one (I bought a Ford LTD, station wagon, of 1971). He also gave me a lab, with a water table, the keys to the lab, and complete freedom.
Every once in a while he came in my room to see how I was doing. And we spoke about the coast, about the intertidal and the subtidal, about who came first, if it was the medusa or the polyp. He had seen some strange hydroids in his early days, before passing to sea anemones, and still was interested about these beasts. I found many new species during my stay. I wanted to study ecology, but I ended up with taxonomy, because there were so many new things. Very few people went diving. There are white sharks, they said. But I went anyway, and collected hydroids and then reared their jellies in the lab. Aequorea victoria, Phialella zappai, Zanclea bomala, Clytia gregaria, two species of Sarsia that are new to science and that I still have to describe. I had my little zoo of jellies, swimming around in little jars. Cadet spent long hours looking at them with me, discussing about what they could be (P. zappai and Z. bomala were new).
At those times Bodega Bay Marine Lab was directed by UC Berkeley, and there were field courses of zoology. One was given by Ralph Smith. One student, Chad Hewitt, found a strange hydroid on a bryozoan. Cadet said to Ralph: ask Nando. I had a look at it and I said: it is a new genus. And Chad and I described Zanclella bryozoophyla and published it in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. Cadet and Ralph were like two kids looking at a candy shop. New species and new genera were the candies. Then we sat outside, looking at Horseshoe cove, in the wind, discussing about what a hydroid and a bryozoan could do together. Ralph died late. His ashes were dispersed in Horseshoe cove. I cannot imagine a better cemetery. The house of Cadet was in the dunes. A single large room, with windows on the ocean. In those years the lab passed from Berkeley to UC Davis. I remained in connection with it, and went back every once in a while. I even organized a two-week workshop of the Hydrozoan Society there. My first student, Giorgio Bavestrello, presented a paper on a strange hydroid that he found in the tanks of the Aquarium of Genova, Italy. It was bipolar. Like the one described by Cadet and Meredith Jones in the paper:
Hand, C. & M. Jones, 1957. An example of reversal of polarity during asexual reproduction of a hydroid. Biol. Bull. mar. biol. Lab. Woods Hole 112 3: 349-357.
The Aquarium was buying artemia eggs from San Francisco, and the eggs were mixed with hydroid resting stages. Giorgio described the cycle of that hydroid in the paper:
Bavestrello, G., S. Puce, C. Cerrano & L. Senes, 2000. Strobilation in a species of Bougainvillioidea (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa). In: C.E. Mills, F. Boero, A. Migotto & J.M. Gili, eds., Trends in Hydrozoan Biology - IV. Sci. Mar. 64 Supl. 1: 147-150.
And Cadet was there to see the solution of that mystery. After more than 40 years -- again like a kid in a candy shop.
The lab changed director and direction. The new director, Jim Clegg, was, and still is, a really nice guy. I enjoyed his company a lot during my visits, and I greatly respect his work. But it is lab work. During my visits I realized that water tables were disappearing, and that more and more sophisticated equipment was taking their place. The grinding frenzy was overtaking the pleasure of looking. One day, somebody told me that in the old days the lab was considered as some sort of country club for the professors of Berkeley who were going there not to do real work, but to have fun. Strange, I said to myself, I have fun when I work, the two go together. What’s wrong with having fun? The real work for them is grinding organisms and passing them through a machine. I have nothing against grinding, but I do not think that it can substitute looking, it can complete it.
Cadet's world was changing around him, but he kept smiling. It was a very good move to name the library after him. He liked to stay in HIS library, with his picture. It is stupid to honor dead people. It is nice to receive approval while one is still alive. So people entered the rooms, looked at the picture, and then saw the guy in the picture sitting at a table, reading some journal. Cadet played a lot with Nematostella, a sea anemone with extraordinary features. A nice model animal, he said. And right he was, since Nematostella is now a favorite victim of the grinding frenzy and is helping in the solution to some problems.
Cadet donated me some books, he was a generous person, he helped me a lot and those eight months at Bodega Bay, in 1983, have a special and unique place in my memories.
A molecular friend of mine was doing her PhD at the Moffet Hospital in San Francisco (I saw the first recognized patient with AIDS, but they did not yet know what it was), she then passed to Caltech and became editor of the reviews of Cell. She was amazed in seeing that I simply showed up in several marine labs, were admitted to the laboratories and spoke with the researchers about their work. In my field, she said, people are afraid of being scooped and talked to nobody. If you show up like that, nobody will talk to you. They are nervous and aggressive. I know there are exceptions, though. I know two who are friendly.
Cadet was like the last of the Mohicans, he was seeing his world being replaced by another one. I would have liked to remain in the US, I really like the place and the people. But there were no chances then for people like me. No grinding? No science. After 20 years, in the age of biodiversity, I made my return with the Partnership for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy. The PEET project on the Hydrozoa was conceived at Bodega Bay, with the smiling approval of Cadet. NSF started to realize that looking is as important as grinding (our eye is the most powerful instrument we have, after all) and that the killing of taxonomy was a mistake.
It is too late for me to start a new life in the US, but it is nice to see that the approach of Cadet is regaining momentum. Taking advantage of all the scientific paraphernalia that available technology can only help the lookers.I think he realized that. I hope they will spread his ashes in Horseshoe cove, together with those of Ralph Smith. I hope there will be a party on the ouside terrace of the lab to honor him. I hope Paul Siri will come back to the lab to grill some salmon. Please tell me the exact time. I will be with you. I am often there with my thoughts, anyway.
If somebody can print this and give it to Cadet’s wife, maybe she will like it. I do not know.
Ah, during those times, at Bodega Bay, I spent long nights in the lab, nursing my jellies. And John Hayes used to come, the janitor. John is a philosopher, a real one. We sat and smoked cigarettes for long hours, talking about everything, he read more books than I. The director and the janitor, the extremes of the hierarchy. They both were exceptional, like all the other individuals in between. That was the atmosphere that Cadet created there. It was my favourite place in the planet (I do not know places in other planets), but it was because of the people, and too many are gone. That atmosphere was conducive to happy work and smiling faces. Cadet was the architect that built that happy learning place.
Now I feel better, folks. I do not know most of you, but I see familiar names from those times, Nancy Stimson... how can one forget such a character? The last day of my stay at Bodega bay I was called to the phone by her, and I went into the phone booth. Another character like her was there waiting for me, and she smashed a whipped cream pie in my face. Then the battle started. There are familiar names from the ecological literature that I know very well but never met. I will be in Phoenix Arizona for the SICB meeting, at the beginning of january. I will dedicate my talk there to Cadet. If you happen to be there, just show up and we might go out and have a beer, and talk about this great guy. If somebody has a nice picture of him, at Horseshoe cove maybe, please do send it to me, I will show it at Phoenix.
Thank you for your patience, if you arrived here
nando, Ferdinando Boero
DiSTeBA (Dipartimento di Scienze e
Tecnologie Biologiche e Ambientali)
Universita’ di Lecce, 73100 Lecce, Italy
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