November, 1999 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 18, No. 7 
WE LOSE BIG 
The month of October was particularly bad for 
students of the arthropods. On 16 October Dr. 
Arthur G. Humes died of a heart attack, and on 
27 October Dr. Austin B. Williams lost his 
fight with liver cancer. Both of these men, 
giants in the fields of crustacean taxonomy and 
biology, will be missed often and sincerely. I 
never had the chance to meet Dr. Humes, but 
from all accounts he was as fine a man as he 
was a taxonomist. One of the contributors to 
the CrustL list server (many have written in 
giving observations and expressing regrets on 
the loss of both these workers) pointed out that 
he was the author of roughly 5% of the known 
species of copepods! He was also a terrific 
editor, and I was privileged to have him serve 
in that capacity on a paper I had in the last 
issue of Journal of Crustacean Biology. He was 
scheduled to step down completely at the end 
of the volume, but didn’t quite make it that 
long. 
I was able to meet Austin Williams at the 1992 
J. L. Barnard Memorial gathering at the 
Smithsonian, where I was representing 
SCAMIT. He was an extremely affable 
individual who was easy to talk to about 
anything that came up. There is a picture of he 
and I from that gathering which I will continue 
to treasure. He read and graciously commented 
on the presentation on thalassinid shrimp I 
gave to SCAMIT in 1992, but the opportunity 
to work with him never quite materialized. His 
contributions to carcinology were many, 
valuable, of broad application, and continued 
until shortly before his death. There may yet be 
co-authored papers waiting in the wings for 
posthumous publication. Fortunately his on¬ 
going fight with terminal illness was known 
enough in advance that the summer meetings 
of the Crustacean Society could be dedicated to 
him in 1998. He received an advance 
impression of how much he was admired and 
respected by colleagues. 
As the taxonomic community continues to age, 
the number of noteworthy departures will 
continue to rise. It will be my sad duty to note 
them in the Newsletter. Drs. Ju-Shey Ho, Tom 
Duncan, and Mas Dojiri have put down 
thoughts and reminiscences of Dr. Humes 
below. Notes on Dr. Williams will be in the 
next NL. Those seeking further information on 
their life, work, and demise should watch the 
CrustL server, and the pages of Crustaceana, 
the Journal of Crustacean Biology, and 
Proceedings of the Biological Society of 
Washington for obituaries and commentary. - 
Don Cadien (CSDLAC) 
In Memoriam Arthur Grover Humes 
22 January 1916 - 16 October 1999 
Arthur G. Humes died 16 October 1999 on his 
way to work at the Marine Biological 
Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He 
had devoted his professional life to research on 
copepods, particularly copepods symbiotic 
with marine invertebrates. 
Born on 22 January 1916 in Seekonk, 
Massachusetts, Arthur G. Humes graduated 
with a B.A. in 1937 from Brown University. 
Arthur originally considered a career as a 
parasitologist and entered Louisiana State 
University, earning his M.S. in Zoology in 
1939. He entered the doctoral program of the 
eminent parasitologist H. J. Van Cleave at the 
University of Illinois and completed an 
extensive study of the parasitic ribbon worms 
Carcinonemertes. Arthur experienced his first 
close encounter with symbiotic copepods while 
collecting parasitic nemerteans from the gills 
and egg masses of various crabs. He was 
awarded his Ph.D. in 1941. In that year he 
published his first paper on copepods, about a 
new species of harpacticoid copepod, 
Cancrincola plumipes, recovered from the gill 
chamber of a marsh crab that he had collected 
while studying the parasitic ribbon worms of 
crabs at Louisiana State University’s Marine 
Laboratory located at Grand Isle, Louisiana. 
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