ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ecologizing the German Oceans, 1868-1887

• In Event: Managing Complexity: Investigating Plants, Forests, and Oceans in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany

English Abstract

In the 1870s and 1880s, German scientists’ goals for studying tiny marine organisms widened dramatically, as there emerged new ways to think about and study these creatures, not as individuals but as parts of a larger whole: the living ocean. In 1877 Karl Möbius coined the term “biocoenosis” to describe the mixed assemblages of organisms living together in particular environments, especially in the context of oyster fisheries. A decade later, his Kiel colleague Victor Hensen would coin the term “plankton” to describe the mass of living matter that floated, and sought to capture their indexicality for the “productivity” of the ocean and the “metabolism” of the sea. These ideas and the research programs developed around them helped to forge a new field: marine ecology.

Although Möbius and Hensen worked together in Kiel from 1868 until 1887, little has been written about how each might have shaped the other’s distinctive research program regarding ocean life. In this paper, I seek to begin to fill that gap. I review both their governing conceptual commitments and the lower-level quantitative and experimental tools, drawn from physiology and the physical sciences, that they applied to their projects. I also address the political and financial affordances provided to their research by its connections to German fisheries interests, as well as the limits their methods met in trying to address the vast complexity of dynamic relations of life in the sea. In the end, Möbius’s and Hensen’s greatest historical significance came from the research programs they initiated rather than the problems they solved.

Author

• Lynn K Nyhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison