Neptune's Needle

Biologist.

The association with Indiana University zoology professor David Starr Jordan, America's leading expert on fishes, led Evermann into that field. In 1891 he joined the U.S. Fish Commission (renamed Bureau of Fisheries in 1903) in Washington, D.C. He held a number of titles, including chief of the division of statistics and methods of fisheries from 1902 to 1903, assistant in charge of scientific inquiry from 1903 to 1910, and chief of the Alaska Fisheries Service from 1910 to 1914. Each summer he sent out three to six people to collect freshwater fishes in various parts of the United States, to determine the distribution of each known species. He spent part of several summers in a detailed study of Lake Maxinkuckee in northern Indiana and in 1920 published the two-volume Lake Maxinkuckee; A Physical and Biological Survey, with junior colleague H. Walton Clark.

Evermann collaborated with his mentor Jordan from his college days until 1930, the year before Jordan's death. The primary concern of U.S. ichthyologists during this period was taxonomy (i.e., the identification and relationships to one another) and distribution of fishes. Evermann's expertise was in compiling synonymies; the history of the descriptions and name changes of species. In summers, Jordan and Evermann traveled together to collect specimens along the Pacific Coast of the United States, in Hawaii, and in Alaska. Each of them collected also in various other places, and they studied collections by others. Together they wrote the four-volume The Fishes of North and Middle America (1896-1900), which established the base of taxonomic studies in its region and was considered a definitive work for many years. They also published American Food and Game Fishes(1902), which was expanded in 1914, and a number of significant papers.

Evermann was recognized by his contemporaries as an all-around naturalist and excellent teacher, in the classroom and on field trips. His colleagues named five genera of fishes and a number of species of animals and plants for him. He died in Berkeley, California.

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Peter Richards