Pioneers of plankton research: Enrique Balech (1912–2007)
| Type | : | ACL |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | : | Production scientifique |
| Au bénéfice du Laboratoire | : | Oui |
| Statut de publication | : | Publié |
| Année de publication | : | 2022 |
| Auteurs (1) | : | DOLAN John,r |
| Revue scientifique | : | Journal of Plankton Research |
| Volume | : | |
| Fascicule | : | |
| Pages | : | |
| DOI | : | 10.1093/plankt/fbac041 |
| URL | : | https://doi.org/10.1093/plankt/fbac041 |
| Abstract | : | Enrique Balech is well known as a dinoflagellate taxonomist to those of us who work on phytoplankton. A simple Google Scholar search reveals that his name appears in 695 articles in the Journal of Phycology, and in 354 Harmful Algae articles. But as pointed out in his obituary published in Harmful Algae (Akselman Cardella, 2008), Balech was actually much more than dinoflagellate taxonomist. He was a pioneer of plankton research in South America. Although he was not the first in South American to publish on plankton (e.g. Faria and Cunha, 1917), Balech appears to have been first career planktologist. In 1938, at age 26, he published his first paper and it was on euglenoid flagellates of the freshwater plankton (Balech and Dastugue, 1938). His last paper appeared nearly seven decades later, in 2008, a year after his death, on the biogeography of Argentinian Seas (Balech and Ehrlich, 2008). Balech actually worked then on a wide variety of topics and over a very considerable span of time. His studies, although frequently focused on Argentine waters, concerned systems ranging from the Antarctic, the Caribbean Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, to the North Pacific. Balech published abundantly, authoring at least 125 works, totaling nearly 4000 pages. He wrote mostly in his native Spanish. However he also published in French, in English and even in Esperanto! Balech was also talented with a pencil, evidenced by not only his illustrations of microplankton, but also his cartoons, as shown in his auto-caricature in Fig. 1. Apparently he was also a playful man. According to Andrés Boltovskoy, the story behind the auto-caricature is that Balech, on a cruise, every night posted a caricature of a crewmember in the mess area. |
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| Fichier attaché | : | - |
| Citation | : |
Dolan JR (2022) Pioneers of plankton research: Enrique Balech (1912–2007). J Plankton Res | doi: 10.1093/plankt/fbac041
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