Stanford University’s John Otterbein Snyder: Student, Collaborator, and Colleague of David Starr Jordan and Charles Henry Gilbert

John Otterbein Snyder (1867–1943) was an early student of David Starr Jordan at Stanford University and subsequently rose to become an assistant professor there. During his 34 years with the university he taught a wide variety of courses in various branches of zoology and advised numerous students. He eventually mentored 8 M.A. and 4 Ph.D. students to completion at Stanford. He also assisted in the collection of tens of thousands of fish specimens from the western Pacific, central Pacific, and the West Coast of North America, part of the time while stationed as “Naturalist” aboard the U.S. Fish Commission’s Steamer Albatross (1902–06). Although his early publications dealt mainly with fish groups and descriptions (often as a junior author with Jordan), after 1910 he became more autonomous and eventually rose to become one of the Pacific salmon, Oncorhynchus spp., experts on the West Coast. Throughout his career, he was especially esteemed by colleagues as “a stimulating teacher,” “an excellent biologist,” and “a fine man.

Sea surface temperature and paleo-El Niño events in Santa Barbara Basin, AD 1841-1941

Like pages of a "natural coastal diary", successive layers of anoxic varved sediment in the central Santa Barbara Basin have been used by paleoceanographers to reconstruct aspects of past coastal climate. This report focuses on the end of the "Little Ice Age" (15th to 19th century) and on the beginning of this century, a period known to encompass extreme climate excursions and weather events in the Santa Barbara Basin and other parts of Southern California. El Niño events are known to disrupt Southern California's coastal ecosystems and to cause anomalous weather conditions, but El Niño events in Southern California before 1990 have been largely undocumented.

Alberto M. Salas. Para un bestiario de Indias. Iconografía de David Almirón.

Esta serie de ProBiota tiene como propósito mostrar diferentes expresiones artísticas relacionadas con la Ictiología nacional y regional, generadas en diferentes épocas y que surgen por diversas motivaciones personales que, en algún caso, muestran casi con exactitud a los modelos que inspiraron la obra, en otras, por lo contrario, responden a la imaginación y creatividad del autor. En este núnero de su Serie Arte y Sociedad, se han recopilado las magnificas ilustraciones de David Almirón que fueron incluidas en la obra “Para un bestiario de Indias” de Alberto M. Salas editada en 1968 y las que aquí son reproducidas con el número de la página donde están ubicadas Estos creadores con particular estilo nos describen parte del “abanico zoológico” del “Nuevo Mundo”. Invito a quiénes no lo hayan hecho, colegas, estudiosos y profanos, a dar una lectura a este libro, puesto que no me queda duda que saldrán enriquecidos en todo sentido. Sólo me resta convocar a quienes quieran sumarse a esta iniciativa de ProBiota, se acerquen con sus aportes para consolidar esta idea, ya que podría ser otro instrumento de difusión del conocimiento de nuestra disciplina a los diferentes estamentos de la sociedad.