Giles W. Mead Jr (b. 1928, d. 2003) was an American ichthyologist and museum curator who was the director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in the 1970s. He gained his doctorate from Stanford University before going on to work at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as a fish taxonomist. He then worked at the Smithsonian Institution before moving to Harvard University, where he was the curator of fishes at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a professor of biology. [1]
Giles W. Mead was born on February 5, 1928, in New York City. His father was Giles W. Mead, a co-founder of Union Carbide, and his mother was Elise. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1935. [2] He gained his Bachelor's in 1949, Master's in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1953 from Stanford University, while also working at the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. While studying for his post-graduate degrees, he joined a group of ichthyology and herpetology students who were being taught by George S. Myers in the university's Natural History Museum. [3]
Mead successfully completed his doctorate in 1953, after which he joined the BCF Laboratory, Woods Hole, although his time at BCF was interrupted by a short period of enlistment in the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland. After the Army, he returned to the BCF at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., replacing Isaac Ginsburg as a fish taxonomist. He occupied this post for 4 years before moving to Harvard, where from 1960 to 1970 he was the curator of fishes and a professor of biology. He left Harvard to return to Los Angeles as director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In this spot, he successfully fought the museum's corner in opposition to Proposition 13. He also oversaw the addition of a new wing to the museum and the opening of a new branch of the museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. He resigned from that post in 1978. [3]
Mead retired to the Mead Ranch, where the Mead family had held property since 1913, in the Napa Valley following his resignation from the museum. He continued to be active, interested in oenology, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel are grown on the 1,300 acres (530 ha) ranch. He also became interested in conservation, and in 1990 the ranch was placed under a conservation easement. [2] He was also active, through the family foundation, the Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation, in supporting conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest and in research and civic support. Through the Mead Foundation, he supported an international conference on the systematics of the fishes belonging to the Order Gadiformes. Other projects supported include Frogfishes of the World by T. W. Pietsch and David B. Grobecker. published in 1987, and ASIH Special Publication No. 3, Collection Building in Ichthyology and Herpetology by Pietsch and William D. Anderson Jr.. [3]
Mead was married and divorced three times and had three daughters and two sons. [2] He was a collector of Native American textiles and Escher prints. He also added to his father's collections of Japanese netsukes and spectacular minerals. He was also a book collector, especially of natural history titles, basing his collection around the collection of William Beebe, which Mead had purchased. [3]
Mead died on 13 February 2003 at the Mead Ranch. The majority of his book collection was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum, with many of the most valuable books being donated to the Huntington Library. [3]
Mead was honored in the names of the following taxa: [4]
The footballfish form a family, Himantolophidae, of globose, deep-sea anglerfishes found in tropical and subtropical waters of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Ocean. The family contains 23 species, all of which are classified in a single genus, Himantolophus.
Samuel Walton Garman, or "Garmann" as he sometimes styled himself, was an American naturalist and zoologist. He became noted as an ichthyologist and herpetologist.
Henry Weed Fowler was an American zoologist born in Holmesburg, Pennsylvania.
Edgar Ravenswood Waite was a British/Australian zoologist, ichthyologist, herpetologist, and ornithologist.
Tarleton Hoffman Bean was an American ichthyologist.
Albert William Christian Theodore Herre was an American ichthyologist and lichenologist. Herre was born in 1868 in Toledo, Ohio. He was an alumnus of Stanford University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in botany in 1903. Herre also received a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Stanford, both in ichthyology. He died in Santa Cruz, California in 1962.
Charles Henry Gilbert was a pioneer ichthyologist and fishery biologist of particular significance to natural history of the western United States. He collected and studied fishes from Central America north to Alaska and described many new species. Later he became an expert on Pacific salmon and was a noted conservationist of the Pacific Northwest. He is considered by many as the intellectual founder of American fisheries biology. He was one of the 22 "pioneer professors" of Stanford University.
Gigantactis is a genus of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Gigantactinidae, the whipnose anglers. The fishes in this genus have a circumglobal distribution in the deep waters of the tropical and temperate zones of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Theodore Wells Pietsch III is an American systematist and evolutionary biologist especially known for his studies of anglerfishes. Pietsch has described 72 species and 14 genera of fishes and published numerous scientific papers focusing on the relationships, evolutionary history, and functional morphology of teleosts, particularly deep-sea taxa. For this body of work, Pietsch was awarded the Robert H. Gibbs Jr. Memorial Award in Systematic Ichthyology by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in 2005. Pietsch has spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle as a professor mentoring graduate students, teaching ichthyology to undergraduates, and curating the ichthyology collections of the UW Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
Oneirodes is a genus of is a genus of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Oneirodidae, the dreamers, a family of deep sea anglerfishes. These predatory, deep-sea fishes are found around the world. This is the type genus, and the most speciose genus, of the family Oneirodidae. They are sexually dimorphic but, like most taxa within their family, the small males are free living and are not sexual parasites on the larger females. Only the females are used to identify the species in this genus as no species specific charaxcters have been found for males.
Coloconger meadi is an eel in the family Colocongridae. It was described by Robert H. Kanazawa in 1957. It is a marine, deep-water dwelling eel from the Gulf of Mexico and Suriname in the western central Atlantic Ocean. It dwells at a depth range of 650–925 m. Males can reach a maximum total length of 37.7 cm.
Gerald Robert "Gerry" Allen is an American-born Australian ichthyologist. His career began in 1963, when he spent a semester at the University of Hawaii, where he also received a PhD in marine zoology in 1971. In 1972, Allen wrote his doctoral thesis on the systematics and biology of the anemone fish.
John Ernest "Jack" Randall was an American ichthyologist and a leading authority on coral reef fishes. Randall described over 800 species and authored 11 books and over 900 scientific papers and popular articles. He spent most of his career working in Hawaii. He died in April 2020 at the age of 95.
Ipnops meadi, also known as the grideye fish, is a highly specialized species of Placodithyran abyssal fish found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The species was named after Giles W. Mead of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, a biology professor at Harvard, deep sea explorer, and ichthyologist.
John Richard Paxton was a United States-born Australian ichthyologist, who spent most of his career at the Australian Museum. He has a particular research interest in lanternfishes and other deep-sea fishes. Paxton is a founding member of the Australian Society for Fish Biology and received the society's K. Radway Allen Award in 1997.
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Gigantactis meadi, Mead's whipnose, is a species of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Gigantactinidae, the whipnose anglers. This species is found in the deeper waters of the southern Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Erik Bertelsen was a Danish ichthyologist, who specialised in deep sea fish. The fish, Diaphus bertelseniNafpaktitis, 1966 is named in his honour.
Daniel Morris Cohen was an American ichthyologist who was known for his studies on the taxonomy of salmonid, gadid, and ophidiiform fishes.