, REUBEN lASKER: A Remembrance. 



filled with sardine eggs rather than wieners. In his 

 enthusiasm to properly study respiration in sardine 

 eggs directly from the sea, Reuben and Gail even 

 installed their Warburg respirometer, without the 

 cooling and shaking system, on the Bureau's old 

 research vessel, the Black Douglas, reasoning that 

 the continual shaking motion of the ship would 

 adequately mix the eggs with seawater. Since the 

 work required a constant cold temperature, the only 

 location that met the requirement aboard the Black 

 Douglas was deep within the bowels of the ship, 

 accessible only by crawling into the confined space 

 on hands and knees. 



It was also about this time that the Cahn elec- 

 trobalance, now a staple of well-equipped laborato- 

 ries was developed. The inventor himself set up 

 the equipment in Reuben's T-21 where it was used 

 for weighing individual sardine eggs and larvae. 

 Reuben also took pride that he was one of the first 

 scientists to use the carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen 

 analyzer, and in fact field tested it for the company 

 manufacturing the equipment. 



The laboratory soon became a magnet for 

 visiting scientists, investigators, and graduate stu- 

 dents. During the summer months, high school 

 students labored at various tasks, measuring 

 euphausiid lengths, collecting limpets, and extract- 

 ing substances from the tube feet of starfish. From 

 his vantage point at a large wooden desk before a 

 picture window with the panorama of the California 

 coastline curling north, Reuben supervised this 

 activity, while continuing to author or co-author 

 numerous papers on energetics of euphausiids, 

 energetics of sardines, physiology and ecology of 

 fish larvae, and ultimately to studies of the mecha- 

 nisms underlying recruitment of fishes. 



In 1963, Reuben organized a symposium on 

 larval fish biology that would encompass topics 

 ranging from systematics of fish larvae to the tech- 

 nology of fish rearing to the basic physiology of 

 single fish eggs and larvae. In the process Reuben 

 forged close personal and professional links with 

 many of the scienfists who attended — James Shel- 

 bourne of the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft, 

 England; Gotthilf Hempel of the Institut fur Hydro- 

 biologie of the University of Hamburg; J. H. S. Blax- 

 ter and F. G. T. Holliday of Aberdeen University; and 

 others — associations which continued throughout 

 his life. 



In 1966, Reuben and his family, which now 

 also included a son, Paul, traveled to Aberdeen, 

 Scotland to work at the University of Aberdeen for 

 one year with Blaxter and Holliday. Here Reuben 

 applied the techniques perfected in his work on 

 euphausiid shrimps to the study of the food chain in 

 an experimentally developed fishery, utilizing hatch- 

 ery-reared larval and juvenile plaice. The year in 

 Scotland with his family proved to be one of the 

 happiest in Reuben's life, leaving him with an abid- 

 ing affection for all things Scottish. 



In October 1964, the Bureau of Commercial 

 Fisheries, Fishery-Oceanography Center, as it was 

 then called, was completed, adjacent to the campus 

 of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was 

 an imposing structure of four concrete buildings 

 grouped around a central courtyard, 220 feet above 

 the Pacific Ocean. The gray cottage, T-21, site of 

 many research accomplishments, was abandoned. 

 Reuben and his staff moved into a wing of the 

 Center which was equipped with the most modern 

 equipment and perhaps most importantly gave 

 access to an experimental seawater aquarium with 

 temperature control rooms for physiological 

 studies and rearing experiments, all of which 

 Reuben helped to design. 



With the move into his well-equipped new 

 laboratory, Reuben assembled a dedicated cadre of 

 behaviorists, physiologists, oceanographers, popu- 

 lation dynamicists, and experimental biologists. At 

 this point in his professional life he had already 

 established a solid basis of scientific achievement 

 on which others could build. His work on the energy 

 exchange between fishes and their food supply, his 

 work on osmoregulation by sardine embryos and 

 larvae, and his work on the effect of temperature on 

 the growth and development of both sardine and 

 anchovy larvae were fundamental to understand the 

 dynamics of fish populations and provided the sci- 

 entific rationale for the project to rear pelagic 

 marine fish in the laboratory. Subsequently, under 

 Reuben's direction and leadership, more than 30 

 species of pelagic fishes, including the commer- 

 cially valuable sardine, anchovy, and mackerels, 

 were reared from eggs, through larvae, to subadult 

 stages, for the first time ever in a laboratory. 

 Reuben's papers on marine invertebrates and on 

 the energy budget of clupeids in relation to their 

 planktonic food were widely read and quoted. His 



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