Zoology Jottings: Emperor Penguin

Showing posts with label Emperor Penguin. Show all posts

Monday, 5 January 2015

Penguins’ Eggs and the Scott Expedition: Cherry-Garrard, Sidney Harmer and Small Worlds

I know this sounds like a I’ve-danced-with-a-man, who’s-danced-with-a-girl, who’s-danced-with-the-Prince-of-Wales story but it actually illustrates how small the scientific world was in Britain in the years before the 1939-1945 War.

In my reading of the antarctic literature and the heroic attempt to obtain embryos of the Emperor Penguin (posts I made throughout 2014 on this site) by Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard in the Antarctic winter of 1911, I came across Cherry-Garrard’s run-in with Sidney Harmer, Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, or, in those days, the British Museum (Natural History).

Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard after their
return from the Emperor Penguin colony at Cape Crozier

Cherry-Garrard’s animus to the Museum began when Cherry-Garrard delivered the penguins’ eggs to the Museum after Wilson and Bowers died with Scott on their return journey from the South Pole. Then in his book, In The Worst Journey in the World, he pulled no punches. His account begins:

Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had written to say I would being the eggs at this time. Present, myself, C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows:

FIRST CUSTODIAN. Who are you? What do you want? This ain’t an egg-shop…You’d best speak to Mt Brown: it’s him that varnishes the eggs.

I resort to Mr Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself…

Sara Wheeler in her biography of Cherry-Garrard, Cherry, describes how Harmer, Keeper of Zoology since 1909 and Director of the Museum since 1919—and now Sir Sidney—responded to the attacks on the Museum both to the press and to Cherry-Garrard himself. Harmer also pulled no punches: “the story seems devoid of any semblance to the truth”, and insisted that his staff had been maligned. George Bernard Shaw helped Cherry-Garrard with a series of letters (as he had with the book) and Harmer was left defending the impossible since Grace Scott, Captain Scott’s sister, had accompanied Cherry-Garrard on a subsequent visit to the BM, and confirmed in writing the attitude of the ‘custodians’.

Wheeler says the main culprit at the museum had died and I have not been able to identify him.

Arguments with Harmer had, however, begun earlier. Cherry-Garrard was invalided out of the army early in the 1914-18 War with ulcerative colitis and worked on his notes from the expedition. Those on the Adélie Penguin he submitted to Harmer (who was editing the reports from the Scott expedition) to see if they were publishable (according to him) or to be published (as can be inferred from Harmer’s reply). Harmer stated that the notes were not publishable as they stood. Wheeler says Cherry-Garrard, always fragile mentally as well as physically, exploded in a letter to Harmer and at the end of it raised his treatment at the hands of Harmer’s staff: “I handed over the Cape Crozier embryos, which nearly cost three men their lives, and has cost one man his health, to your museum personally, and . . . your representative never even said ‘thanks’.”

Between these spats, Cherry-Garrard supported Harmer over the slaughter of penguins for oil and meat in a letter to The Times (18 February 1918):

Sir,—May I back Dr. Harmer’s letter pointing out the danger of attacking penguin rookeries? If the slaughter of penguins and seals or the collection of penguin eggs is to be undertaken, the public should insist that it is done under the effective control of the Governments concerned, probably those of Australia and New Zealand. The true Antarctic penguins are fairly safe at present; there is no danger that the rookeries of the Emperor penguin will be harmed unless people want to go bird-nesting in 170deg. of frost; and the Adelie penguin is protected by the pack ice. But there is very great danger for the sub-Antarctic penguins which live in the islands north of the pack ice, and which are therefore more accessible…

Harmer it seems was a difficult man to fall out with. In his Obituary Notice for the Royal Society, W.T. Calman (1871-1952) noted:

…It is related that when the Trustees of the British Museum were considering the appointment of a Director, a very important person who was also a Cambridge man urged his appointment to the vacant post on the grounds that ‘Nobody could possibly quarrel with Harmer’.

Sir Sidney Harmer FRS

Harmer is known for his role in the protection of whales in the southern oceans. Sidney Harmer was one of the old school zoologists who knew the entire Animal Kingdom while specialising in a particular group or groups. He was renowned for his work on what was then the Polyzoa but now often called the Bryozoa. At Cambridge he also became interested in whales, for example, a stranded Sowerby’s Beaked-whale on the Norfolk coast. When he moved to the BM he initiated the scheme under which stranded whales were reported to the Museum. According to his Obituary Notice, he did a great deal of work on whales which was never published and tried to sort out the classification of the dolphins.

His major contribution to the conservation of whales started in 1913. Calman wrote:

It is not clear when the Colonial Office first asked for help from the Museum in connexion with the whaling industry, if, indeed, they did ask for it. All that seems to be recorded is that in 1913 Harmer prepared a ‘Memorandum relating to whales and whaling’ which was printed on Colonial Office paper.

In order to mark whales to study their migration, Harmer supervised the first experiments with a large cross-bow to fire a marker into the body that could be recovered when, rather than if, the whale was killed and cut up by whalers:

At one time he had a large oil-cloth model whale behind the Museum and I seem to remember him in morning coat, striped trousers and bowler hat, excitedly watching the first shots…with this very barbarous-looking mediaeval weapon.

In short, Harmer became a first champion for whales. He analysed the statistics collected by the whaling companies and warned of the rapidly increasing rate of destruction of the whale populations around Antarctica.

To return to the first line of this post, I realised that I had met Sidney Harmer’s daughter, Iris Mary, and indeed that she was known by many of my former colleagues. At an event, I think to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham (since re-named as the Babraham Institute), Marthe Vogt, who had formally retired from the Institute in 1965 and would have then been 85, brought her former boss’s widow, Lady Gaddum, then aged 94. Shortly afterwards, incidentally, Marthe Vogt moved to live with her sister in California and lived until the age of 100 years and 1 day. Lady Gaddum, née Iris Mary Harmer, married Sir John Gaddum (Director of Babraham from 1958 until shortly before his death in 1965) in 1929.

I now find that Iris Mary Harmer had been involved in an important discovery. She was what would probably now be described as a clinical scientist after graduating with a first from Cambridge and then a London medical degree. She worked with Sir Thomas Lewis at University College, London on the famous ‘triple response’ and provided some of the first evidence, in papers published in 1926 and 1927, for the release of a histamine-like substance (Lewis’s H-substance) in human skin in response to minor injury. She died in 1992, aged 98.

So, there we have it, the very small world of British science in the early years of the 20th century. I talked with a woman—who was the daughter of a man—who upset an explorer—who collected Emperor penguin eggs on Scott’s final expedition. Much more interesting than to have danced-with-a-man, who’s-danced-with-a-girl, who’s-danced-with-the-Prince-of-Wales, don’t you know.

Thursday, 3 July 2014

In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why?...What happened to Nelson Norman's 1959 embryos?

Following on from my earlier posts of 8 April and 26 June, I have to make it clear that this is an interim account of what I have been able to find on this story as it extends into the 1950s and 60s. This is because I do not have ready access to some of the reports which are in libraries a long way away from where I live. However, I can certainly lay down the bones of the story and then follow up with more detail, if the original sources do not confirm the second-hand accounts, when I am next in London.

If you have read my first post on this topic you will see that my curiosity was aroused by reading Nelson Norman’s 2009 book, In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Nelson Norman makes it clear that he was not only miffed by the reception he received on taking the Emperor Penguin embryos gathered with great difficulty and not a little danger during the antarctic winter of 1959 to Professor Glenister at Charing Cross Hospital but also by the fact that he had not been able to find out what happened to them:

I enquired several times over the years and was persistently told by FIDS that the embryos were being worked on…Nearly fifteen years later when I was in a position to consider the matter further and was a research director myself I went to the British Antarctic Survey (as FIDS was known by that time), expressed my concern, and asked for my embryos back saying that I would find an interested embryologist and we would work them up between us. This was agreed but when it asked for the embryos, the Survey was told that a technician had accidentally disposed of them!

It is now evident from the literature that the embryos were worked on and a report written. However we need to take a step backwards in order to take the story forwards.

Bernard Stonehouse collected a series of Emperor Penguin embryos in 1949; these Glenister examined. A short account of his findings is Nature in 1953. He also wrote a report for FIDS which was published in 1954. I have not yet seen the latter. His letter to Nature contains little of real substance (not unusual for Nature in those days). He wrote:

…comparison of the development of the external form of the Emperor penguin with that of the chick and with that of other penguins already described, namely, Gentoo and Ring penguins by Parsons and Gentoo and Adelie penguins (Pygoscelis adelia [sic]) by Waterston and Geddes, reveals a fact not yet recorded and worthy of note. In the earlier embryos the head region is relatively smaller, the neck and tail regions relatively longer, and the curvatures less well marked in penguin than in chick embryos. These features are more marked in Emperor penguin embryos and result in early penguin embryos resembling early reptilian embryos more closely than do chick embryos.

To which, I am afraid, my response is a very loud So What?

In his full report for FIDS (which I repeat I have not seen), C.Herbert, in his 1967 report on embryonic development in the Adélie, states:

More recently, Glenister (1954) investigated a series of 16 embryos of A. forsteri. Nine of the youngest were sectioned serially and a number of features which he considered primitive were listed. Glenister concluded that penguins are the most primitive birds, and that A.forsteri is the most primitive penguin.

How Glenister came to the conclusion that penguins are the most primitive birds I do not know.

That embryology could provide the answer was still being peddled in the 1960s. For example, the Committee on Polar Research of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA produced a report in 1961 stating:

Wilson and others made an extremely hazardous winter journey to collect emperor penguin embryos, hoping they would show reptilian features (Cherry-Garrard 1922), but the features were not found (Parsons 1934). Glenister (1954) describes eight features of the emperor embryo which suggest that penguins are primitive birds, and the emperor the most primitive of all…A study of a series of Antarctic penguin embryos of known ages is still awaited.

In view of Nelson Norman’s experience, I was surprised to find Herbert’s report of his work on the Adélie contains the information on what happened to the Emperor embryos Norman had collected:

The most recent description of embryos of the emperor penguin was by O’Gorman (1964) on embryos collected during the Royal Society International Geophysical Year Antarctic Expedition, 1955-59. He used the unpublished notes of J. [Nelson] Norman to calculate the ages of these embryos. Norman’s timed series of embryos, although in poor condition and small in number, enabled O’Gorman to adopt a multiplication factor of 2.9 to calculate the ages of the penguin embryos from the equivalent chick stages described by Hamburger and Hamilton (1951).
Both Glenister and O’Gorman expressed the need for an accurately timed series of developmental stages of a representative penguin. To fulfil this need a timed series of embryonic stages of P. adeliae, P. antarctica and P. papua was collected at Signy Island, South Orkney Islands, during the period January 1965 to February 1966.

So Nelson Norman had been incorrectly informed when he made his enquiries. Not only had his embryos been used but a report had been written and published in 1964.

I then found that Fergus O’Gorman had also been in the Antarctic at the same time as Norman as a zoologist with FIDS/British Antarctic Survey from 1957 to 1960 (working with my old dining companion, the late Nigel Bonner, in 1958). Half of O’Gorman’s entry can be seen in the online Google extract from the 2001 (3rd) edition of The Environment Encyclopedia and Directory and shows that he was a researcher at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School between 1960 and 1962; in other words he was working with Glenister on the embryos collected by Norman during this time.

Why nobody told Norman what had happened to his embryos seems an extraordinary oversight.

But the idea that the penguin embryo was going to reveal the origin of birds lingered on. The September 1968 issue of Antarctic, a news bulletin published by the New Zealand Antarctic Society, contained the following (my underlining):

American Programme for 1968-69

On June 28 the following ambitious 1968-69 United States Antarctic Research Programme was announced by the National Science Foundation in Washington

Iowa State University — Early Embryology of the Adelie Penguin
Dr. J. R. Baker and a field assistant from the Iowa State University, Ames, will continue the study of the early stages of the Adelie penguin embryology. The research will again be conducted at Hallett Station and Dr. Baker will seek to determine the effect of climate on incubation and how the Adelie embryo is formed. It is hoped that these studies may provide information on the evolutionary origin of penguins, whether from flying birds or reptiles. Following the Antarctic field work additional work will be carried out at the Iowa State University laboratories.

John R.Baker (1930-2012) did not publish on the evolutionary origin of penguins, whether from flying birds or reptiles. He did, however, follow up earlier observations that the rate of embryonic development is slow in penguins compared to other birds and that incubation period and the temperature of eggs in the nest vary in this species. In other words, he turned embryology into a study in physiological ecology to determine the effects of incubating Adélie penguin eggs at different temperatures.

I find it remarkable that the Edward Wilson’s big ‘thing’—getting embryos of the Emperor Penguin—was still being quoted as the justification for research on penguin embryos nearly 70 years after the discovery of the Cape Crozier rookery. Haekel’s recapitulation theory was dead in the water; all the evidence pointed to flying birds being the ancestors of penguins, and yet the idea, by now it seems a meme, ran on and on in the Antarctic exploration community.

Nelson Norman’s book led me to read the classics from the period of Antarctic exploration, including the superb Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s, The Worst Journey in the World. That led me off in other directions…but I cannot end this series without showing Edward Wilson's Sunset on Mount Erebus.

-----------------------------------

Baker J R. 1969. Studies of the rate of development of the Adélie Penguin embryo. Antarctic Journal 4, 116

Committee on Polar Research of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (1961). Science in Antarctica. Part 1. The Life Sciences in Antarctica.

Glenister, T W. 1953. Embryology of the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri). Nature 171, 357.

Glenister, T W. 1954. The Emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri Gray: II. Embryology. Falkland Islands Dependency Survey Scientific Reports No. 10. London: HMSO

Herbert C. 1967. British Antarctic Bulletin 14, 45-67

O’Gorman F. 1964. Observations on emperor penguin embryos. In The Royal Society International Geophysical Year Antarctic Expedition, Halley Bay, Coats Land, Falkland Islands Dependencies, 1955-59. IV. Meteorology, glaciology, appendixes. pp 353-363. Ed Blunt D. London: Royal Society.

Weinrich J A, Baker J R 1978. Adélie Penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) embryonic development at different temperatures. Auk 95, 569-576

Thursday, 26 June 2014

In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why?...Continued

Since writing In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why? on 8 April, I have read more and more on antarctic exploration in order: first, to understand why Edward Wilson, chief of the scientific staff of Scott’s final (1910-1912) expedition and who died with Scott, was willing to go to such lengths to obtain embryos of the Emperor Penguin; second, to try to understand why the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (FIDS) was still trying to collect embryos in the late 1950s. I have also found, in the literature, the fate of the embryos collected by Nelson Norman in 1959.

However, the Scott expeditions (Discovery, 1901-04; Terra Nova, 1910-1912) were not the first to collect penguin embryos. Robert Neal Rudmose Brown (1879-1957) and James Hunter Harvey Pirie (1878-1965), members of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition led by William Speirs Bruce (1867-1924), collected embryos at different stages of development of the Gentoo (Pygoscelis papua) and Adélie (P. adeliae) penguins. These embryos were brought back to Edinburgh where they were examined by David Waterston and Auckland Campbell Geddes of the anatomy department ‘through the kindness of Dr W.S. Bruce’.

The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition^‡ left Troon on 2 November 1902. Scotia, formerly the Norewegian whaler Hekla, had been refitted for the antarctic at the now defunct Ailsa shipyard in Troon, a short distance from where I shall be teeing off from the 1st at Royal Troon at 7.50, as usual on Fridays, tomorrow morning (weather permitting, of course). This successful expedition returned on 21 July 1904 to the Marine Biological Station at Millport, now sadly reduced to a study centre for schools. I shall return to the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition later since its very existence has a bearing on later developments.

Route of the Scotia

Scotia

Waterston and Geddes wrote up their findings for the expedition’s report published on 21 October 1909.

With regard to these developmental facts the question arises:— Is the duck's or the penguin's wing the more direct descendant of the common ancestor; or have they both diverged from the common stock approximately equally, but in opposite directions. Embryology alone cannot answer this question, but the evidence is clear in this, that the fore limb of the penguin in its development goes through a progressive and continuous series of stages along one unbroken line. The mesoblastic portion of the fore limb elongates, but its characters do not alter. It elongates, however, with a relatively greater rapidity towards the end of development, whereas the duck's fore limb, after being relatively longer than the penguin's ever is, regresses rapidly. So that the answer to our question, so far as the embryological evidence is concerned, must be that the wings of both these birds are different from the ancestral wing, and that the differentiation has been in opposite directions and that the common ancestor was a flying bird of a somewhat primitive type depending in large measure for the spread of its wing upon bone and muscle.

Their conclusions could not be more clear; the ancestor of modern birds and penguins was a flying bird.

One of the two laboratories on Scotia

Bruce had placed his penguin specimens with two of the leading anatomists/embryologists in Britain. David Waterston was demonstrator in anatomy at Edinburgh. In 1909, the year of publication of the report, he went to the chair at King’s College, London but in 1914 moved to the Bute chair of anatomy at St Andrews (as a golfer he perhaps could not resist the temptation of the Old Course). He died at the age of 70 in 1942, still occupying the Bute chair.

Coats Land. The expedition named this part of the
continent for the Coats family, the sewing cotton
manufacturers (now the multinational Coats plc),
who funded the expedition.

Auckland Campbell Geddes went on to a remarkable career. At the time of the penguin work he was assistant to the Professor (only one per department in those days), D.J. Cunningham, author of the famous Manual of Practical Anatomy. On graduation in 1908, he was appointed demonstrator. He was late to qualify because he had interrupted his medical studies to serve in the Highland Light Infantry during the Boer War.

His first public achievement from 1908 lived on until recently. His suggestion that the army volunteer force should be named The Territorial Force was adopted by Lord Haldane (JBS’s uncle), then Secretary of State for War. In 1909 he went to Dublin as Professor of Anatomy and then, in 1913, to McGill University in Montreal. He returned on the outbreak of war. He rose from Major in the 17th Northumberland Fusiliers in 1914 to Brigadier-General and Director of Recruiting at the War Office in 1916-17. He was then elected Member of Parliament for Basingstoke and Andover in 1917, becoming Minister of National Service from 1917 to 1919. He was then British Ambassador to Washington from 1920 to 1923. Sadly, he lost the sight of one eye. After his recovery, he served as Chairman of Rio Tinto. in 1942 he was injured by a flying bomb and also lost the sight of his other eye. He became Baron Geddes of Rolvenden in 1942. He died in 1954, aged 74.

The collectors of the penguin eggs also became well established. Rudmose Brown (1879-1957) was botanist on the Scotia Expedition. After working for Bruce after their return, he turned to geography, becoming Lecturer at Sheffield in 1907 and Reader at Manchester in 1920. He returned to Sheffield as Professor of Geography in 1931, retiring in 1945. In both World Wars, he served in Admiralty intelligence. Throughout, he continued his interest in the Arctic and Antarctic. He died in Sheffield in 1957.

Pirie (1878-1965) was the expedition’s medical officer, geologist and bacteriologist. On his return he was a medical practitioner in Edinburgh until 1913 when he joined the Colonial Service as a bacteriologist in Kenya. He was Deputy Director of the South African Institute for Medical Research from 1926 until 1941. In 1940 he gave the name Listeria (after Joseph Lister) to the bacterial genus. In 1948 he was living in Bournemouth on the south coast of England.

So, did Wilson not realise that the findings from the Scotia expedition would render his quest for Emperor penguin embryos unnecessary? Or did he judge the Emperor to be so different, in fact unrelated to the Adelie and Gentoo, that he thought the findings irrelevant? Was he even aware of the results from the Scotia expedition? Was he too busy with his work on the grouse disease inqjuiry and preparing for the Terra Nova expedition to study Waterston and Geddes’s findings between their publication in October 1909 and the departure of the Terra Nova in June 1910? I have been unable to find the answers to any of these questions from reading about Edward Wilson.

However, here’s where the politics of polar exploration kicks in. The Scotia expedition and its leader, Bruce, were regarded as the lowest forms of life by the power broker in British antarctic exploration, Sir Clement Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society. All my reading indicates that Markham was rightly considered by later commentators a classic Monster. However, Markham’s personality is beside the point. The animus to Bruce was so great that I find it difficult to see Wilson raising any of the (excellent) results of that expedition in discussions over whether it was worthwhile to attempt the journey to Cape Crozier to collect the Emperor embryos with Markham in full control of the expedition and Scott, Wilson’s friend but Markham’s protégé.

From what I have read so far, I conclude that the collection of Emperor embryos was Wilson’s big ‘thing’ and had been his big ‘thing’ since his earlier discoveries on this species in the Discovery expedition of 1901-1904.

Geoge Seaver, in his book on Wilson, states that he gave three lectures to fellow expedition members and that ‘his own notes of them have been preserved but those taken by Scott and others are not without interest…In his second lecture he traced the descent of Penguins from the primitive lizard-bird, explaining their anatomy, and finding corroborative evidence in their primitive fossilized remains’. Those notes could well be worth examining anew to see what Wilson’s understanding was at that time.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Wilson’s protégé, who with Wilson and Bowers undertook that indescribable winter journey from Cape Evans to the rookery at Cape Crozier wrote in The Worst Journey in the World:

What is this venture? Why is the embryo of the Emperor penguin so important to Science? And why should three sane and common-sense explorers be sledging away on a winter's night to a Cape which has only been visited before in daylight, and then with very great difficulty?The Emperor is a bird which cannot fly, lives on fish and never steps on land even to breed. It lays its eggs on the bare ice during the winter and carries out the whole process of incubation on the sea-ice, resting the egg upon its feet, pressed closely to the lower abdomen. But it is because the Emperor is probably the most primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so important. The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives. The embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the reptiles from which birds have sprung*.

After the deaths of Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Edgar Evans on their return from the Pole, Cherry-Garrard obtained a series of embryos from Adélie Penguins at Cape Royde. He wrote:

It was always Wilson's idea that embryology was the next job of a vertebral zoologist down south. I have already explained that the penguin is an interesting link in the evolutionary chain, and the object of getting this embryo is to find out where the penguins come in. Whether or no they are more primitive than other nonflying birds, such as the apteryx, the ostrich, the rhea and the moa, which last is only just extinct, is an open question. But wingless birds are still hanging on to the promontories of the southern continents, where there is less rivalry than in the highly populated land areas of the north. It may be that penguins are descended from ancestors who lived in the northern hemisphere in a winged condition (even now you may sometimes see them try to fly), and that they have been driven towards the south.

If penguins are primitive, it is rational to infer that the most primitive penguin is farthest south. These are the two Antarcticists, the Emperor and the Adélie. The latter appears to be the more numerous and successful of the two, and for this reason we are inclined to search among the Emperors as being among the most primitive penguins, if not the most primitive of birds now living: hence the Winter Journey. I was glad to get, in addition, this series of Adélie penguins' embryos, feeling somewhat like a giant who had wandered on to the wrong planet, and who was distinctly in the way of its true inhabitants.

So Cherry-Garrard in 1922 seems to be expressing a different reason for collecting embryos—that the most southern could be the most primitive penguins but not the most primitive bird—from Wilson in 1910. But the phrase if not the most primitive of birds now living could be taken to mean that it still might be shown that the Emperor is the most primitive bird. Alternatively, if not actually means even if not. I tend to think it means the latter since otherwise he would be contradicting himself in these paragraphs.

Cherry-Garrard collected embryos from the Adélies during that period after the remaining members of the expedition found the bodies of the polar party, Scott, Wilson and Bowers. Surely Wilson in the many months they had together would have mentioned to Cherry-Gerrard whether Adéle embryos had been examined previously. That leads me to think that Wilson had not seen the report of the Scotia Expedition before embarking on Terra Nova. Original documents and notes on the contents of the libary taken by Scott and his party could well provide more information.

The story of penguin embryos does not end there…

----------------------

Waterston D, Geddes AC (1909) Report upon the anatomy and embryology of the penguins collected by the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 47 part 2, number 10, 223-244

Seaver, G (1933) Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. Naturalist and Friend. London: John Murray

*There is a difference in wording between the Pimlico edition 2003 (Vintage 2010) and that available online as a Project Gutenberg eBook; the latter appears to be from the original 1922 edition published by Constable in 1922.

‡Excellent photographs of the expedition are at:

http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/scotia/ and http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/apr2004.html

Tuesday, 8 April 2014

In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why?

Nelson Norman’s 2009 book, In Search of a Penguin’s Egg, worked its way to the top of my to-be-read pile and I found it a fascinating account of how he came to be sent, as a newly-qualified medical graduate doing his National Service, to Antarctica as a medical officer and voluntary general factotum to the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) (now the British Antarctic Survey) at Halley Bay for the antarctic winter of 1959.

As part of his research activity he was asked by Sir Raymond Priestley, an Antarctic explorer in his younger days and former vice-chancellor of the University of Birmingham who was still active with FIDS, to obtain a series of Emperor Penguin embryos at 12-hour intervals over the first ten days of incubation:

…he told me that 4 or 5 kilometres from Halley Bay, there was a rookery of emperor penguins…He told me that these birds were close to being the most primitive species of bird and possibly the embryological link in the evolutionary chain between reptiles and birds. They were thus if great scientific importance. There was an anatomist at Charing Cross Hospital who was desperate to get a precisely timed series of emperor penguin embryos at twelve-hour intervals for ten days. He stressed the importance of this and asked me to secure them…Nor did he tell me that a previous attempt had been made during Scott’s last expedition and that only one man had survived—Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

Before his departure, Norman had a half-hour meeting with Dr Glenister of Charing Cross Hospital who repeated his requirement for the timed series of preserved embryos.

By ingenuity, dedication and fortitude—but not without danger during the Antarctic winter—Norman succeeded in bringing back the series of embryos. However, the reception of his embryos in London was less than enthusiastic:

…The taxi crossing London did not crash—as had been my recurring nightmare in Antarctica—neither was the enthusiastic Dr Glenister standing on the front steps to meet me. I was informed politely but rather coldly by a secretary that he was now the Professor of Anatomy and a a very busy man. I was, therefore, invited to leave the embryos and my report with a technician and basically just to go away. I did this rather reluctantly and unhappily, and I never heard anything more from Professor Glenister though I did think that he could at least have written a short note of thanks considering what we had gone through to produce the embryos. I enquired several times over the years and was persistently told by FIDS that the embryos were being worked on…Nearly fifteen years later when I was in a position to consider the matter further and was a research director myself I went to the British Antarctic Survey (as FIDS was known by that time), expressed my concern, and asked for my embryos back saying that I would find an interested embryologist and we would work them up between us. This was agreed but when it asked for the embryos, the Survey was told that a technician had accidentally disposed of them!

What an appalling way to treat a young scientist, was my thought as I read Nelson’s account. But the reason for writing this post is to remark that this sort of treatment of young scientists and technicians was by no means uncommon. I have known individuals who have worked hard to complete a task, only for the specimens or results to be ignored for weeks, months, years and, sometimes, for ever.

So why was Nelson launched on this ultimately worthless mission? The story is well known of how Edward Wilson, chief of the scientific staff of Scott’s final (1910-1912) expedition and who died with Scott and his party, had become convinced that by studying the embryonic development of the Emperor Penguin he could follow the evolutionary transition from reptiles to birds. In 1907, in his report on the 1901-1904 expedition in which the breeding cycle of this species was discovered, he wrote: The possibility that we have in the Emperor Penguin the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of penguins but of a bird, makes the future working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest importance. It was a great disappointment to us that although we discovered their breeding ground. and although we were able to bring home a number of deserted eggs and chicks, we were not able to procure early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest can be worked out. Obtaining embryos was Wilson’s aim when he set off in 1910.

The appalling conditions endured by Wilson, Henry Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard in their search for the eggs are described by Apsley-Garrard in his book, The Worst Journey in the World. Three eggs survived the six-week, 65-mile return journey from Cape Crozier. The three men also survived this part of the expedition; Wilson and Bowers then died with Scott’s party. It would appear that Cherry-Garrard’s life was wrecked by the trauma of the whole expedition and its outcome.

The enthusiasm of the Natural History Museum for the receipt of Cherry-Garrard’s eggs in 1913 was a forerunner of the enthusiasm of Glenister for the arrival Nelson’s embryos. The account in The Worst Journey in the World of his encounter with the Museum’s officialdom is an example of British jobsworths at their finest. However, the 1911 embryos were worked on, first by Dr Richard Assheton FRS, lecturer in embryology at Cambridge who died in 1915, then by Professor Cossar Ewart FRS, professor of natural history in Edinburgh, who produced a report that can only be described as kindly and, finally, 20 years after their collection, by Charles Wynford Parsons FRSE (1901-1950) of the University of Glasgow. Parsons did not pull any punches: [the eggs] have not contributed much to the understanding of the embryology of penguins.

View of the Emperor Penguin Rookery at Cape Crozier by Edward Adrian Wilson
From his report of the 1901-04 Expedition

Before moving to consider why, during the 1950s, the collection of Emperor Penguin eggs was considered to be of such importance to FIDS, what drove the enthusiasm of Wilson in the first place?

Two influences are said to have driven him. The first, which seems bizarre to the point of craziness when looked at now and perhaps even then, was the suggestion in a long paper by Mikhail Aleksandrovich Menzbier (1855-1935), professor of comparative anatomy in Moscow, that penguins had evolved separately from reptiles on a parallel evolutionary line to other birds. However, the argument that Wilson got his impetus from Menzbier does not quite stack up with his statement, The possibility that we have in the Emperor Penguin the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of penguins but of a bird. Wilson seemed to have the impression that the Emperor Penguin could be the most primitive of all birds which is not what Menzbier was arguing.

The second influence was, of course, recapitulation, the theory of Ernst Haeckel: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. The flaws in making this idea a law of nature are so well known that I will not repeat them. However, if true, the development of the Emperor Penguin should, if it were the most primitive bird, show it passing through a reptilian stage relatively late in development. That is what Wilson was hoping the results would decide.

Encouragement along the lines of a separate descent for penguins or for the Emperor Penguin being the primitive bird did not come from the Natural History Museum. W.P Pycraft in the same volume as Wilson’s report of the 1901-1904 expedition wrote:

All that can be gleaned from fossils, then, is that penguins have probably descended from birds which possessed full powers of flight, and this probability becomes converted into a certainty when the embryological evidence comes to be examined. But the question of the precise affinities of this group must still be regarded as an unsolved problem, the intense specialisation which these birds have undergone obliterating much of the necessary evidence.

However, Pycraft was clearly thinking along Haeckelian lines when he supported the collection of more embryos:

Some day another Antarctic Expedition will be sent out, when it is to be hoped that, so far as the penguins are concerned, special efforts will be made to secure the earlier nestling stages of the King, and the latter stages of the Emperor Penguin full-grown nestlings of the latter being especially needed; while of both species the early and middle embryonic stages are wanted. Ripe embryos will add but little of real value to our knowledge, since they differ but little of course from the newly-hatched nestling, and furthermore, several examples are among the spoils of the expedition herein concerned. A few adults of both species would certainly be useful if preserved entire, in spirit, or in ice.

Although ideas, often wrong, on the evolutionary history of penguins rumbled on, the notion that the Emperor Penguin was vital for the study of the origin of birds was well and truly dead by the 1950s. Also by then recapitulation had also been effectively demolished as a doctrine. So why did Sir Raymond Priestley push the importance of collecting a series of embryos to Nelson Norman? Was FIDS in some sort of time warp with its own unchanging research agenda, locked into continuing the unfinished research of dead antarctic heroes? The cynical might be tempted to suggest that some at FIDS were looking for reasons to use the Halley Bay base and its nearby penguin colony for biological research on the use it or lose it principle of government funding. However, since most of the research there was concerned with the physical environment and FIDS was taking over Halley Bay from the Royal Society which had established it for the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, there may have been no need for a research excuse.

The request to Nelson seemed even more strange to me when I read (not in Norman’s book) that a series of Emperor Penguin embryos (16 from the primitive streak to hatching) had been collected by Bernard Stonehouse in 1949 and described by Glenister in a letter to Nature. Without providing quantitative data, Glenister stated that early penguin embryos (others had described Gentoo and Chinstrap penguin embryos) resemble early reptilian embryos more closely than do early chick embryos. The thought also occurred to me that since the Emperor and King penguins are closely related and, then and now, included in the genus Aptenodytes, why the insistence on Emperor embryos when King Penguins were readily accessible and available in abundance on South Georgia where whaling stations were maintained until the 1960s?

Finally, there is Professor Glenister who seemed less than keen to receive Norman’s embryos. Tony William Alphonse Glenister (1923-1998) was an embryologist at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. He became Professor of Embryology, then of Anatomy. He was Dean of the Medical School from 1976 to 1984 and then Dean of the combined Charing Cross and Westminster school until 1989. A building is named after him at Imperial College, the final destination of these medical schools in the organisational reshuffles of the London colleges. He was President of the Anatomical Society in 1979-81; he wrote Anatomy and Physiology for Nurses.; he has 18 papers listed in PubMed, mainly on mammalian embryology. Recently, he has been identified as one of the referees who opposed the awarding of a grant to support the work of Edwards and Steptoe on human fertilization in vitro (IVF). In that he was by no means alone.

I do not know how Glenister became involved with the penguin embryos. One explanation is that he was drawn in by FIDS to work on the embryos brought back by Stonehouse. Glenister wrote a report for FIDS entitled, The Emperor penguin, Aptenodytes forsteri Gray: II Embryology. I have not seen this report but I think it is a fuller version of the letter to Nature. His work on the embryos was descriptive and I can only assume that in sending Norman for more he felt that there were gaps to be filled. Whether he then lost interest in the topic or somebody had a quiet word with him that the work was of insufficient scientific importance, whether he became bogged down in university administration or whether his role in the Territorial Army increased, I do not know. Whatever the reason there is no doubt that Norman, quite rightly, felt highly aggrieved by his reception on delivering the embryos, by the lack of contact with Glenister and, later, by their destruction.

Sadly, Nelson Norman’s and Cherry-Garrards’s experiences when they returned were not, and may still not be, uncommon. As to the wider question, of why FIDS persisted in pursuing an outdated notion (hypothesis would be too strong a word), a historian delving into the archives may be able to judge. However, such behaviour would not be unusual for a British government department or agency. Research agendas unchallenged by effective external review were alive and well into the 2000s, to my certain knowledge; some still may be.

The appraisal of Wilson’s pursuit of Emperor Penguin embryos must not detract from his and the other explorers’ achievements in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. An incredible amount of work was done in all the relevant fields of science; important discoveries emerged from each expedition. The observations and collections they made would have been arduous in a temperate environment; in an antarctic winter with temperatures as low as -61°C survival alone was a triumph.

Antarctica stands head and shoulders above anywhere else in the world I have visited. The scenery, the air, the ice, the mammals and the birds have to be seen and heard to be believed. I can see why the explorers were drawn back.

Our view back to the ship from Jougla Point, Wiencke Island, Port Lockroy in 2005. The furthest south we reached in the Lemaire Channel was still 1722 statute miles from the South Pole.

The ship is the MV Lyubov Orlova which hit the headlines recently (Ghost ship carrying cannibal rats 'may have sunk’, for example) is either drifting in the Atlantic or has sunk.