Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Alwyne Wheeler 5 October 1929–19 June 2005

2006; Wiley; Volume: 68; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.0022-1112.2006.01034.x

1095-8649

Oliver Crimmen,

Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology

Alwyne (‘Wyn’) Wheeler was an ichthyologist, foremost authority on British fishes and a curator at The Natural History Museum in London. He was born in Woodford Green, Essex, and educated locally to Higher School Certificate level. He rose to prominence without university qualifications. Hence progress was not always easy and his success is a tribute to his determination. He had an early interest in natural history and belonged to the London Natural History Society at the age of 13. During National Service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, both in the U.K. and Jamaica, he was able to continue his interests in the Natural History Society of Jamaica. After army service he applied to the British Museum (Natural History)[now The Natural History Museum (NHM)] for the post of Assistant in the Department of Zoology. He started work in the Fish Section on 1 July 1950, aged 20, and was placed under the tutelage of Geoffrey Palmer, assistant to the famous ichthyologist, J.R.Norman. Wyn's passion was fishes and he became one of the Museum's expert naturalists with an international reputation. His work involved the care of one of the largest collections of preserved fishes in the world and his approach was extremely meticulous (once described by a senior colleague as ‘fanatical’). Although Wyn had interests outside the Museum and was a devoted family man, when it came to his work, he was quite single-minded. Two revolutions took place during his career at the NHM which he saw as unnecessary distractions. One was the arrival of personal computers. Wyn habitually worked with handwritten catalogues, registers and specimen labels relating to the NHM's collections and was accustomed to answering professional and public enquiries, sometimes a hundred a month, by letter drafted for a typist. The other revolution was in systematics, as the Phylogenetic Systematics (cladistics) movement changed the theoretical basis as well as the practical methods by which fishes were classified. Wyn did not really espouse the new discipline and for the most part it did not affect his sphere of work. In the practical business of taxonomy, in the proper naming of fishes, he was an expert, and he felt that the stability of Latin names was important. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, based at the NHM, often co-opted Wyn's expertise to adjudicate on matters of fish names. Wyn Wheeler specialized mainly in the taxonomy of European fishes and studies of historical collections of taxonomic importance. Most of the more than 100 scientific publications he produced were reviews, reports, identification guides or were encyclopaedic in nature, rather than in the main thrust of the NHM's studies: systematics. His most important book The Fishes of the British Isles and North-west Europe was the first authoritative modern guide to British fishes. The high price and inadequate distribution of the book led to the production of the Key to the Fishes of Northern Europe. He also contributed regularly to popular magazines and books. One of Wyn's more noteworthy projects was an account of the fishes in the London area instigated by the London Natural History Society. This was concluded in1958 and showed that there were virtually no fishes apart from eels in the metropolitan tidal Thames. Ample evidence showed that this was largely due to high levels of pollution and consequent lack of dissolved oxygen in the river. Later, in 1964, he was visited at the NHM by an old National Service colleague who was now an engineer involved in the construction of the new power station at West Thurrock on the Thames. This man had found an unusual fish, actually a tadpole fish, on the cooling water intake screens at the Power Station. Wheeler later ascribed to ‘this happy accident’ the origins of a suggestion as to how to monitor an evident return of fishes to the River Thames. Wheeler gave the engineer preservative and specimen labels and he produced several more interesting species from the screens during the 1960s. Wheeler gained the co-operation of the Central Electricity Generating Board and a series of collecting stations were set up at Power Stations. Wheeler combined these results with catch-lists from fishing competitions run by the Greater London Council and special netting surveys in collaboration with the Port of London Authority and The Ministry of Agriculture. Thus the species list of Thames fishes grew to 72 by the end of the 1967–1973 survey (it is currently 122). Together with growing lists of wildfowl and other fauna, this work was widely hailed in the press as demonstrating the effects of the ‘clean-up’ of the River Thames resulting from improved sewage treatment and better regulation of industrial effluent. Wheeler's The Tidal Thames; The History of a River and its Fishes is a fascinating and invaluable record summarizing this study. By contrast with this enthusiasm and communicability with his contacts outside, Wheeler gained something of a reputation among some of his senior colleagues at the NHM for being too secretive about his work. As a manager he was no soft touch and he instilled the very highest standards of curation in his staff. He could be tough on his juniors, but immensely inspirational and encouraging too. He was at his most illuminating when working in the field, treating those who sorted catches at sea with him to a share of his vast knowledge. This fieldwork focused on the relatively well-known European fauna and took him on Atlantic trawlers or wading in rivers or electrofishing in ponds. It chimed with his instincts as a naturalist (he was no armchair zoologist) and his down-to-earth nature. In the 1960s during the ‘cod wars dispute with Iceland over marine fisheries’ territories, Wheeler was sent on a 4 month Ministry of Agriculture expedition to northern Atlantic fishing grounds to conduct trawl surveys. The aim was to look for fish resources that might be used as substitutes for cod. This and subsequent voyages produced specimens which greatly enhanced the Museum's Collections. His considerable reputation led to requests for media appearances for commentary about fishes in the news or participation in natural history programmes. Whilst only an occasional angler himself, Wyn was a great friend to Britain's huge fishing community. He wrote regular columns (‘Wheeler Watch’, ‘Know Your Species’etc.) in the angling press giving expert biological information. He served on the British Record Fish Committee as the identification authority for both marine and freshwater fishes, ensuring that records were free from mis-identifications. In a world famous for ‘the one that got away’, Wyn was the authoritative voice that gave the Record List much of its credibility. He exposed a fraudulent record claim for the pike by devising a method of identifying pike by their individual markings and revealed that many record claims for the crucian carp were worthless due to confusion with liberated large dull-coloured goldfish. Fish bones feature extensively in archaeological remains and are valuable indicators of human diet, fishing practice, and even historical fish distribution. They are notoriously difficult to identify, however, compared with the relatively well-studied mammal and bird remains. Wyn passed on his considerable expertise in fish bone identification to students such as Andrew Jones, who led a movement to pay more attention to these abundant archaeological clues, and with whom Wyn co-authored a manual which is the standard text in archaeoichthyology. Wyn Wheeler's interest in the history of his discipline led him to publish authoritative papers on many of the founders of ichthyology, including Daniel Solander, Johann and George Forster, Peter Artedi, Gronovius, C.S.Rafinesque and, particularly Linnaeus. As a prominent member of the Linnaean Society, Wyn curated and published a catalogue of the Society's collection of Linnaeus’ specimens in London, and also those at the University of Uppsala and the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm as well as a commentary on Linnaeus's sources of knowledge of fishes. No doubt Wyn could identify with Linnaeus, whose methods also relied on communicating with a great many naturalists. Nevertheless, Wyn never lost interest in Essex wildlife and published papers on the history and fauna of that region, particularly the ponds in Epping Forest. Wyn served on the Council of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History and edited the Society's journal for more than 30 years. He was elected President in 1987. He was skilful as an editor and this helped to develop the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History(now mercifully re-titled Archives of Natural History) into the very high-quality, internationally respected journal that it is today. Wyn had suffered from osteoarthritis for some time and he retired from the NHM in 1989. Thereafter he worked at Epping Forest Conservation Centre and periodically visited the NHM in his capacity as an official Scientific Associate. He continued to publish on fishes and maintained his ichthyological contacts. He took over the editorship of the Journal of Fish Biology for the Fisheries Society of the British Isles, of which he was a founder member, during 1990–1991. In 1992 he published a faunal list of British fishes, useful for its justifications for the names used and for the inclusion or exclusion of rare or debatable records. This authoritative work was extended and revised in 2004, by which time it had to be completed by colleagues as Wyn, having contracted Alzheimer's Disease, finally became too ill to contribute further. He died on 19 June 2005 aged 75.