James W. Nybakken: September 16, 1936 – June 20, 2009 An Appreciation

Abstract

A long-time member of AMU/AMS, President in 1986, and distinguished teacher, marine biologist, and researcher, James W. Nybakken (Fig. 1) died of leukemia June 20, 2009 at the age of 72. Jim did his graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, completing his Ph.D. in 1965 with a dissertation on the ecology of Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Shortly after his study, an earthquake elevated much of the bay’s intertidal zone several meters, and Jim’s thesis, published by the University of Alaska (1969) provided invaluable baseline data to assess the ecological effects of the earthquake. In September 1965, Jim joined the faculty of California State University Hayward (now CSU East Bay). In January 1966, he began teaching at the CSU system’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML), where he was a member of the founding faculty and where he spent the rest of his career. He served as acting director of the Laboratories in the mid-1990s. “Throughout his tenure at MLML he witnessed the transformation of a small fi eld station cobbled together in an old cannery building to a modern marine institution with an international reputation for excellence in marine science.” (www.mlml. calstate.edu/announcements/news/6-24-09). I fi rst met Jim when he was a graduate student participating in a three-month International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE) cruise on the then Stanford University teaching and research vessel Te Vega in 1963. This ship facilitated inshore and coral reef studies in the western Indian Ocean, from Singapore through the Strait of Malacca and Malaysia to northern Thailand, and then through the islands off the south coast of Sumatra, ending rather ignominiously with an irrevocably broken drive shaft off Padang. The scientifi c personnel consisted of six faculty members and museum curators and six graduate students from diverse universities. Jim and I worked together on comparative ecology of the important reef-associated gastropod Conus, discovering in the process the most species-rich assemblages known at the time. Fig. 2 shows Jim, as well as Joe Rosewater, who also served as AMU president, in 1969, aboard the Te Vega during the IIOE cruise. In 1968-69, Jim, together with his wife Bette and their two small sons, Kent and Scott, spent a year’s leave of absence from MLML in Seattle, where Jim and I analyzed the fi eld data from the IIOE cruise and worked on writing up the results. We were able to obtain ecological data on 48 species, and we found up to 27 of them on a single reef. Co-occurring Conus species typically specialize differentially on prey species, but those in more diverse assemblages proved not to be more specialized. Rather, they consumed a wider array of prey taxa, and they specialized more on different microhabitats than did those in habitats that support fewer species. We also demonstrated size-selective predation, that only the largest individuals of prey species may be large enough to repay foraging effort, and that Conus individuals shift their diets to larger prey species as they grow (Kohn and Nybakken 1975). During that year, we also collaborated on the fi rst scanning electron microscopic morphological study of the harpoonlike Conus radular tooth (Kohn et al. 1972), and Jim embarked on studies of the ecology and radular morphology of Eastern Pacifi c Conus (Nybakken 1970a, 1970b, 1971, 1979a, 1979b). While Jim’s biological interests were broad, most but not all of his research focused on molluscs. His other notable contribution to the biology of Conus was the fi rst study ever made of ontogeny of radular teeth (Nybakken and Perron 1988,