NAFO posted on December 31, 2007 11:53
Ransom Aldrich Myers
(1952 – 2007)
Dr. Ransom Aldrich Myers, Jr. (known as RAM), born 13 June 1952 in Lula, Mississippi, died 27 March 2007 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a World-renowned marine biologist and conservationist. He was the son of cotton planter, Ransom Aldrich Myers, Sr. and Fay A. Mitchell Myers. At age 16, in 1968, Myers won an international science fair for building an "X-ray crystallograph" which measured the symmetry of atoms.
Myers graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from Rice University in 1974 followed by an M.Sc. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dalhousie University. He started work as a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans in St. John's, Newfoundland, and in 1997, joined the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University as the first Killam Chair in Ocean Studies.
Myers was best known for his passionate warnings on the worldwide overfishing of fish stocks in the oceans, in particular Atlantic cod and Southern bluefin tuna. As a member of the IUCN shark specialist group, he collected data on the decline of shark populations and directed the focus of the media on threatened shark species. One of Myer's most important areas of research was stock recruitment: collection and analysis of data and the subsequent development of models to predict the survival rate for fish larvae. RAM attended several NAFO Scientific Council meetings over the years, most recently at the Special Session in September 2006, and contributed numerous papers to the work of the Scientific Council on fish and marine mammal stocks in the NAFO area.
In the October 2005 issue of Fortune, Myers was listed among the world's ten people to watch for "working to develop new and better ways to husband the wealth beneath the sea."
On 27 March 2007 he died in Halifax, Nova Scotia from a brain tumor. RAM is survived by his wife and their five children
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