Candelas is island's 1st true ecologist
Published on Sunday, July 5th 1998 on The San Juan StarDear Gustavo Candelas:
Sorry to have missed the recent commencement ceremony at UPR where a doctorate honoris causa was bestowed upon you. I would have wanted to be there, not as faculty or as a member of the Council on Higher Education. I wanted to be there as your student. You were my first ecology teacher, and it was you who got me interested in marine sciences. You are Puerto Rico’s first ecologist. There may have been many excellent Puerto Rican naturalists before you, but you were the first ever to get a doctor’s degree in ecology. I clearly remember when you came to borrow my uncle Jorge’s winter coat to travel to Minnesota to suffer your final doctoral exams and thesis defense after you had finished your dissertation on the fresh water plankton of Puerto Rico.
I had been admitted to do graduate studies at the University of Minnesota in something entirely different: human physiology. I had applied into Minnesota because you had graduated from there. But when then-chairman Carlos García Benítez offered me a job as an instructor in biology, he suggested that I postpone my graduate work –I was quite young and could afford to wait, he said– and that I take the summer marine ecology course that you and Graciela were offering in Puerto Rico for the first time that summer, at La Parguera. Your course would be a refresher and bring me up to date. I took your course, and it was there and then that I decided to become a marine biologist. Your fault. That was back in 1957.
At that summer course you exposed us to figures such as the renowned oceanographer Robert E. Coker, to chloromycetin discoverer and leading marine microbiologist Paul Burkholder, to famed marine botanist Sven Zaneveld, to marine invertebrate specialist Norman Mattox, and to local pillars such as Institute of Marine Biology founder and director Juan Rivero, marine botanist Luis R. Almodovar, and budding planktologist Gerardo González. The beautiful marine shells on Rivero’s coffee table, and his surrealistic colorful wading shoes, are still impressed in my memory. Later you introduced us to theoretical and mathematical ecologist Ramón Margalef, with whom you spent several seasons in his laboratory in Barcelona.
In the next two years, while I was instructing in the Biology Department, you became chairman and you unabashedly invited to UPR the best scientists you knew. To name just a few, I must highlight embryologist Nelson Spratt, plant ecologist Pierre Dansereau, and cell physiologist Burr Steinbach. One day, while driving Burr and Susie Steinbach around the island, we came to a sugar cane fire. His concern while watching the fire was not the loss of the sugar cane or the fire, but for all the sodium and potassium that was being lost to the atmosphere because of it.
You also brought two scientists that you had met while you and Graciela were at Duke: comparative embryologist Edward Horn and marine botanist Harold Humm. Largely because of those friends of yours, I trained at Duke. This is also your fault.
I remember when you became interested in mangroves and in learning more about them. At least two of your students later went on to become prominent specialists in mangrove ecology. That mangroves are so highly regarded as natural communities today, and that public policy was enacted to protect them, is partly your fault. I also remember your interest in turtle grass beds. Same as with mangroves. In fact, I have not met an ecologist as broad in his or her interests nor as influential as you. For someone who initially specialized in fresh water plankton, you have taken on the whole of nature!
Talking about breadth of interests, you always brought a comment to class about some book you had just read, or some theater play or musical you saw in New York, or some anecdote about a poet or artist with whom you were acquainted. Your friendship with Julio Rosado del Valle started him on his grasshopper drawings. You took him snorkeling to Las Cabezas de San Juan one day, where he cut himself on a piece of coral. There is a famous Rosado del Valle painting that portrays that marine habitat, and some of his blood. Your fault too. Your private art collection will be coveted by museums. Ah, yes, and your interest in music! Have you ever missed a Casals Festival concert since the festival began forty two years ago? Or an opera?
Perhaps you did not suspect while you were training at Minnesota that ecology was to become as prominent as it is today. Or maybe you did. I’m sure that you have some misgivings when you see ecology so bent out of shape, so misconstrued, so horribly manipulated, so politicized, so commercialized, so faked as it is today. But you have always kept your cool. I remember they used to say that you had been born with Equanil in your blood. You have elegantly stayed away from the environmental bandwagons. You have been forever the teacher, the scientist, the referee.
As consultant and advisor, you have given of your knowledge to local government agencies, academic institutions, developers, and all who have sought it. Most of all, you have given freely and without constraints to students. If I were to list all your students who have become prominent ecologists, physicians or scientists, the list would not fit on this page. As a researcher, you were able to stimulate research and provide for the scientific investigator when you were chairman, sometimes to your own detriment. You were more generous to other researchers than you were to yourself.
Gustavo, I’m sorry I missed your honoris causa commencement the other day. But I didn’t miss any of your classes in the past. I thank you for being my teacher. Puerto Rico thanks you for being an ecologist. The world thanks you for being a scientist.
Maybe I’ll be able to attend the ceremony when they create the Gustavo Candelas Chair in Ecology someday, and perhaps even help install the first Gustavo Candelas Scholar.