Harry John Grier (1940–2018)
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OBITUARIES Copeia 107, No. 2, 2019, 373–378 Harry John Grier (1940–2018) Mari Carmen Uribe1 and Lynne R. Parenti2 ARRY JOHN GRIER was an accomplished reproduc- attest. But the formal classroom did not suit him and a fish tive morphologist, fisheries biologist, tropical fish farm did not provide a reliable income, although he H farmer, and photographer. He was born on August maintained fishes in his personal aquaculture facility on his 7, 1940 in New York City where he grew up. His early property in Riverview, Florida, throughout his life. In 1984, education was in the City’s public school system, and he Harry took a permanent position as a biologist in what is now graduated in 1964 with a B.A. from Queens College (now part the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s of the City University of New York). Harry’s contacts in and Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg. One of interactions with the local aquarium trade drew him to the his major assignments was to study the reproduction of some study of the viviparous poeciliid fishes, the guppies, mollies, of the state’s most popular and important marine gamefishes: swordtails, and relatives. He was also encouraged and guided the Common Snook, Centropomus undecimalis, and the Red by Donn E. Rosen, ichthyologist at the American Museum of Drum, Sciaenops ocellatus. These two species became the focus Natural History (AMNH), for whom Harry worked as a of his 34-year research career at the FWRI. research assistant from 1963 to 1964. There Harry experi- Harry was a reproductive morphologist who always enced aspects of museum science firsthand, including the searched for the more general applications and implications importance of comparative biology and the value of a large of his research. He brought attention to the uniform biological reference collection. structure of the germinal epithelium (Grier, 2000; Grier and When employed as a sheet metal worker in the early 1960s, Lo Nostro, 2000) and the significance of the basement Harry decided to pursue a scientific career against the objections of his mother who did not want him to leave a membrane (Mazzoni et al., 2015) in gonad morphology, as good paying, steady job. After getting his B.A., he headed well as modified the protocol for oocyte staging in fishes to south, never again to live in the northeastern USA. Harry make it adaptable to all taxa (Uribe et al., 2009). He completed an M.A. in 1968 at the University of North maintained a strong interest in poeciliids and their relatives, Carolina, Chapel Hill, followed by a Ph.D. in 1973 under the as well as other atherinomorph fishes, all of which have a direction of Joe R. Linton at the University of South Florida, unique reproductive morphology, a feature that he discov- Tampa. Harry was the first person awarded a Ph.D. from that ered. In the late 1970s, one of us (LRP) was a graduate student campus. His doctoral dissertation on ‘‘Reproduction in the teleost Poecilia latipinna: an ultrastructural and photoperiodic investigation’’ formed the basis of his first scientific publica- tions (Grier, 1973, 1975). These combined his love of poeciliids and fish reproduction with his keen eye for anatomical detail and tireless photo documentation that would remain the cornerstones of his research throughout his life. Harry held the post of Assistant Professor of Biology at USF for one year, then left for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Endocrinology, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, from 1974 to 1976. He returned to Florida in 1976 to become the owner and manager of Florida Tropicals, a tropical fish farm in Lakeland. Harry moved easily between the academic and the aquarium worlds, understanding what each brought to our knowledge of the biology of tropical fishes. He served as an editor of the tropical fish hobbyist periodical Fresh Water and Marine Aquarium for 20 years from 1981 to 2001. For short periods in the early 1980s and again in the 1990s, Harry taught part-time at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa. Harry was an engaging teacher one-on-one as his many colleagues and students will Fig. 1. Harry Grier, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2006. Photo from H. J. Grier. 1 Facultad de Ciencias, Laboratorio de Biolog´ıa de la Reproduccion´ Animal, Universidad Nacional Autonoma´ de Mexico,´ Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 Mexico,´ D.F., Mexico;´ Email: [email protected]. 2 Division of Fishes, NHB MRC 159, PO Box 37012, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20013- 7012; Email: [email protected]. Ó 2019 by the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists DOI: 10.1643/OT-19-210 Published online: 25 June 2019 374 Copeia 107, No. 2, 2019 (Grier, Linton, Leatherland, and DeVlaming, 1980) published a paper in which a particular form of the testis was described as unique to atherinomorphs: spermatogonia are restricted to the distal ends of testis lobules, rather than distributed along the length of the lobules. Rosen and Parenti (1981) used this character to diagnose the Atherinomorpha as a monophy- letic taxon. It is the most cogent morphological character of atherinomorph monophyly (e.g., Parenti and Grier, 2004). This is a remarkable contribution to systematic ichthyology from someone who would not identify himself as a systematist. Harry’s influence on a range of fields is reflected also in several other tributes: Brown-Peterson and Lowerre- Barbieri (2018) and Kroll et al. (2019). Harry was an international scholar who developed strong relationships with colleagues worldwide. He attend- ed the European Ichthyological Congress in Stockholm in 1985 where he and LRP discussed potential collaborative projects on groups of atherinomorph fishes, especially those little known and little studied, such as the phallos- tethids of Southeast Asia. A joint publication on this topic (Grier and Parenti, 1994) kicked off 25 years of collabora- tion and friendship. Harry was most proud of his appointment as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History beginning in the early 1990s. Harry was a regular visitor to the fish collection. There he could sample fixed gonads from a range of taxa and life history stages. One important finding of this research was that initially well-fixed, archival museum specimens can reveal remarkable details of reproductive morphology, as demonstrated for the freshwater oviparous goodeids Crenichthys and Empetrich- thys Fig. 2. Harry Grier photographing goodeid fishes maintained in the (Uribe et al., 2012, 2018) and the deep-sea aulopiform Laboratorio de Biolog´ıa Acua´tica, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicola´s Chlorophthalmus (Parenti et al., 2015), as well as the de Hidalgo, Morelia, Michoaca´n, Mexico,´ 2014. Photo by L. R. Parenti. phallostethids, among other taxa. Harry was naturally communicative and enjoyed the of Rosen’s at the AMNH working on cyprinodontiform company and conversation of his many colleagues and systematics. The relationship of cyprinodontiforms to other students. A phone call from Harry could easily last an atherinomorphs was in question, as was the monophyly of hour, or more. He was an ace photographer and brought the atherinomorphs as a whole. Then Harry and colleagues his professional camera gear with him wherever he went, Fig. 3. Harry Grier, Mari Carmen Uribe, and Lynne Parenti (left to right), July 2, 2016 in Pimmit Hills, Virginia. Photo by J. R. Burns. Obituaries 375 capturing friends and colleagues in informal portraits that Grier, H. J., J. R. Linton, J. F. Leatherland, and V. L. hewouldprintandsendtothemasgifts.Hewasinvited DeVlaming. 1980. Structural evidence for two different regularly to present his research at international symposia testicular types in teleost fishes. American Journal of and meetings. In 1998 one of us (MCU) invited Harry to Anatomy 159:331–345. participate in the first International Symposium on Grier, H. J., and F. Lo Nostro. 2000. The germinal Viviparous Fishes held in Cuernavaca, Mexico.´ His partic- epithelium: a unifying concept, p. 233–236. In: Proceed- ipation in that meeting began two decades of vibrant ings of the 6th International Symposium on the Reproduc- collaboration and cooperation between Harry and Mexican tive Physiology of Fish, Bergen 1999. B. Norberg, O. S. colleagues. Two books edited by Harry and MCU (Uribe Kjesbu, G. L. Taranger, E. Andersson, and S. O. Steffanson and Grier, 2005, 2010) brought together many of the (eds.). University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway. results from that and subsequent symposia. These richly Grier, H. J., and L. R. Parenti. 1994. Reproductive biology illustrated volumes provide essential reviews and primary and systematics of phallostethid fishes as revealed by data on the fishes that exhibit some form of live-bearing. gonad structure. Environmental Biology of Fishes 41:287– Harry also developed strong connections with colleagues 299. in South America, as well as throughout the US. He Grier, H. J., W. F. Porak, J. Carroll, and L. R. Parenti. 2018. brought a critical scientific and artistic eye and demanding Oocyte development and staging in the Florida Bass, standards of histology to these collaborations, as seen in Micropterus floridanus (LeSueur, 1822), with comments on the crisp illustrations in his publications. He insisted on the evolution of pelagic and demersal eggs in bony fishes. embedding gonad tissue in plastic, not paraffin, which Copeia 106:329–345. required a dedicated tissue processor and microtome, as Grier, H. J., M. C. Uribe, F. L. LoNostro, S. D. Mims, and L. well as special skills. R. Parenti. 2016. Constancy of the germinal epithelium Harry regularly attended ASIH meetings and published his through 500 million years of vertebrate evolution. Journal research in Copeia. He was sensitive to the continued loss of of Morphology 277:1014–1044. vertebrate biodiversity and, with MCU, organized a sympo- Kroll, K., C.