In memoriam: Melbourne Romaine Carriker 1915-2007

Journal of Shellfisheries Research, March, 2008 by Clement L. Counts, III, Robert S. Prezant, J. Evan Ward

While at UNC, Mel spent 1956 to 1960 conducting research at North Carolina Institute of Fisheries Research. He also cooperated at the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratory at Morehead City and the Duke University Marine Laboratory at Beaufort, North Carolina. During these summers, Mel focused his research on gastropods that drilled oysters. The Chair of the Department, Charles Jenner, headed both the limnology and marine ecology divisions of the department and undervalued Mel's contributions to the point that Mel was dismissed in 1961.

Mel then accepted a position at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and he and his family moved to Easton, Maryland in the fall of 1961. Mel took up his position at the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries Laboratory at Oxford, Maryland, as Chief of the Shellfish Mortality Program. He was in charge of research on MSX, the parasitic disease of Crassostrea virginica Gmelin, 1791 that was gaining a substantial hold on oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay; however, obtaining funding was problematic and frustrating. Just as Mel was beginning at Oxford, he was offered and then accepted the position as Director of the newly established Systematics-Ecology Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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The Systematics-Ecology Program operated successfully between 1962 and 1972 to study the flora and fauna of the western North Atlantic. Among other accomplishments, Mel developed the keys to Woods Hole Region with Ralph I. Smith (Smith 1964). He believed that the accurate identification of species was central to good ecological practice. In furtherance of this belief, Mel developed and supervised the publication of the series Keys to the Flora and Fauna of the Northeast Atlantic Coast for the National Marine Fisheries Service. During this time, Mel also served on the Northeastern Regional Council, assembled by the American Institute of Biological Sciences to study bioscience research to be conducted on a manned Earth-orbiting space station (Olive and Beem 1967). By 1972, federal funding was becoming scarce and Mel accepted a full professorship at the College of Marine Studies of the University of Delaware.

Mel (Fig. 1) was responsible for helping to lay out the new Harry L. Cannon Laboratory. He was instrumental in developing the shellfisheries program, and a new species of amoeba found in the tanks was named in his honor (Ovalopodim carrikeri Sawyer, 1980). Mel taught graduate courses in malacology and recruited experts in marine ecology who presented summer graduate courses. He supervised the research of 11 doctoral and 18 master's students, and also served on the doctoral and master's committees of over 150 individuals since 1951.

Mel's research, over six decades, concentrated on the biology of Crassostrea virginica and its predator Urosalpinx cinerea (Say, 1822). He believed that the biology and ecology of predator and prey were entwined and that one could not be understood without knowledge of the other. How does U. cinerea penetrate the shell of C. virginica? How do newly-hatched U. cinerea find C. virginica? What are the structures and physiology of U. cinerea that allow it to bore a hole through the shell of C. virginica and other bivalves? Mel employed everything from simple field observations to x-ray microanalysis. His observations included sound recordings of the rasping of U. cinerea and cinematography which can be viewed on the following web site: (http://www.iwf.de/iwf/do/mkat/details.aspx?Signatur=C 13067). He was also among the first to apply scanning electron microscopy to the microstructure of the radula of U. cinerea and the shells of C. virginica and Mytilus edulis (Linnaeus, 1758). Mel identified the accessory boring organ (ABO) of the drills U. cinerea and Eupleura caudate (Say, 1822) and, through anatomical, histological, and histochemical methods, elucidated their structure and function in penetration of bivalve shells. He was able to link the shape of a bore hole with the snail species that produced it even in paleontological specimens (Carriker and Yochelson 1968). Mel's studies also made use of histochemistry, and he examined the elemental analysis of major and minor trace elements in oyster shell using a proton probe, developed by Charles P. Swann. Mel also studied chemoreception by U. cinerea and E. caudata with his student Betsy Brown and post-doctoral fellows Leslie G. Williams and Dan Rittschof. Mel continued to exercise his interest in estuarine pollution and its effects on the benthos, the invasion of coastal waters by exotic species and the impact of those invasions on commercially-valuable molluscan species. Mel summarized much of the results of his long study of oysters in Kennedy et al. (1996) and Mercenaria mercenaria in Kraeuther and Castagna (2001).