Gordon Pennington Gunter (August 18, 1909 – December 19, 1998) was an American marine biologist and fisheries scientist. He is noted for his pioneering study of fisheries in the northern Gulf of Mexico, a topic to which he devoted his entire professional life over a career spanning 60 years.Burke, W. David, 1999, "Gordon Pennington Gunter, 1909-1998," Gulf Research Reports 11 (1): pp. 65-67. His own research, and that of the scientists under his direction, established an understanding of the ecology, comparative physiology of the plant and animal life, and commercial fisheries of the region,shellfish.org Frank, Dane, "Biography: Gordon Gunter Aug. 18, 1909 - Dec. 19, 1998," National Shellfisheries Association Quarterly Newsletter, June 2006, pp. 5, 7. and he coined the phrase "fertile fisheries crescent" to refer to Mississippi Sound and adjacent waters along the United States Gulf Coast.Shaw, Joyce M., "History of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory," Gulf of Mexico Science, 2010(1–2), pp. 109–126. He also pioneered the study of the comparative physiology of shellfish and fish.
Early life Gordon Pennington Gunter was born in Goldonna, Louisiana, on August 18, 1909. Arriving at Louisiana State Normal College in Natchitoches, Louisiana, with plans to study to become a lawyer or a French scholar, he instead took a strong interest in biology as soon as he took his first college course in the subject, and he graduated in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts in Zoology. He then attended the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, to study bacteriology and received a master's degree in 1931.
Career Early career After graduation, Gunter became a researcher for the United States Bureau of Fisheries, studying shrimp and oysters in Louisiana and Florida. He also studied ichthyology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and participated in the U.S. Engineers Office′s Debris Dam Fisheries Survey.
University of Texas In 1939, Gunter returned to the University of Texas as an instructor in physiology, concurrently taking a position as a marine biologist with the Texas Fish, Game and Oyster Commission. He received a Ph.D. in physiology and zoology from the University of Texas in 1945.
The University of Texas founded the Institute of Marine Science at Port Aransas, Texas, in 1945, and Gunter began research there after receiving his Ph.D. He served as acting director of the institute from 1949 to 1954 and as its director from 1954 to 1955. He also was the editor of the University of Texas's Publications of the Institute of Marine Science from 1950 to 1955 and founded the publication Contributions to Marine Science.
Gulf Coast Research Laboratory In 1955, Gunter left Texas to become director of the University of Southern Mississippi′s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a position he assumed on September 1, 1955. At the time, the laboratory was merely a part-time summer school teaching facility with one full-time scientist (a marine biologist) and two part-time support personnel making up its entire paid staff and a physical plant that was so limited that students often worked and studied outdoors. Gunter had a vision of the laboratory becoming a major research center for the study of marine biology and fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico; he set about fulfilling that vision, and he is best known for his tenure at the laboratory. During its 16 years with Gunter as its director, the laboratory experienced tremendous growth in the size of its scientific staff, its educational efforts, and its physical plant. The laboratory's first project under Gunter's direction funded by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service was a study of the life cycle of the menhaden published in 1958, and much of the significant early fisheries research in the northern Gulf of Mexico took place under his direct supervision as director.
Gunter was an avid and voracious reader and believed strongly in keeping up to date on current professional literature, and on September 1, 1955,gcrl.usm.edu The University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory Gunter Library as one of his first initiatives as director, he established a research library at the laboratory for use by faculty, staff, visiting scientists, and students. The library began as a collection of books and reprints in Gunter's office, and he built its collection almost singlehandedly, purchasing and donating to it many of the early volumes in its collection. In April 1961 he established the publication Gulf Research Reports – renamed Gulf and Caribbean Research in 2002 – which he described as "...devoted primarily to publication of the data of the Marine Sciences, chiefly of the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent waters." He also used Gulf Research Reports as a means of further building the laboratory's library, trading issues of the publication for scientific journals to add to the library's collection, and the library became arguably the premier marine library on the U.S. Gulf Coast. In 1963, a full-time professional staff began working at the library, by 1971 it took up a third of the ground floor of one of the laboratory's buildings, and by May 2010 its collection exceeded 27,000 volumes.
After he arrived in 1955, Gunter oversaw a construction program to give the laboratory far more extensive and modern facilities. His tenure saw the construction of the laboratory's oceanography building, a 40-room brick dormitory, the anadromous fisheries building (destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005), the research building, the Caylor Building, and a maintenance shop, as well as the rebuilding of the Hopkins teaching laboratory (destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969). The research vessel Gulf Researcher also was constructed for the laboratory while he was the director. Gunter also pursued other goals to build a significant research program at the laboratory, including the recruitment of high-quality personnel, developing a network of affiliated colleges and universities to enhance the summer field program by bringing in students from other universities and other states, the founding of a museum, and championing the laboratory and its work to state university presidents and the members of the Board of Trustees of the Institutes of Higher Learning of the State of Mississippi, the Mississippi Legislature, and the Mississippi Academy of Sciences.
Gunter was an early advocate of aquaculture, and he foresaw an industry involving the mariculture of shrimp eventually growing along the U.S. Gulf Coast. In 1968, although no advanced technology for the farming of shrimp yet existed, Gunter created and led one of the first research teams – a handpicked staff of physiologists – to look into the development of artificial shrimp feed for use in raising shrimp in commercial aquaculture. His pioneering work helped lead to a burgeoning shrimp-farming industry along the U.S. Gulf Coast by the mid-1980s.
In addition to furthering the interests of the laboratory, Gunter found time to conduct his research. Investigating oyster mortality in the Gulf of Mexico, Gunter conducted research that aided in identifying the parasitic protist Dermocystidium marinum, later renamed Perkinsus marinus, the pathogen causing the disease perkinsosis, also known as dermo, in oysters.
Gunter saw an understanding of the effects of the Mississippi River on the biology of fisheries in the north-central Gulf of Mexico as essential to understanding and managing fisheries resources in the area, and he supported the idea of a large, 20-to-25-year effort by a multidisciplinary team of scientists to discover and assess the river's impact. As the sole expert consultant to the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Mississippi for several years, he researched the paleogeography of the Mississippi River and projected the course of the river if the Corps of Engineers did not engage in flood control and other efforts designed to modify the river's behavior. He concluded that without the work of the Corps of Engineers, the Atchafalaya River increasingly would capture the waters of the Mississippi, that the two rivers would be of equal size by 2038, and that the Mississippi eventually would cease to flow past New Orleans, and instead would turn westward to flow down to the Gulf of Mexico down the course of the Atchafalaya, entering the Gulf of Mexico near Morgan City, Louisiana. Colleagues credited Gunter with being instrumental in urging the Corps of Engineers to require environmental impact statements.
Gunter also saw the laboratory through Hurricane Camille, which struck during the night of August 17–18, 1969, flooding its grounds with a storm surge that reached a depth of . Although its research vessels rode out the storm safely, the laboratory suffered the destruction of about half of its buildings – three of brick construction and four wooden ones – and severe damage to its wooden dining hall. Gunter told the students at the laboratory to go home the day after the storm because of the destruction of the facilities necessary to accommodate them, which he described as "one if the sadder duties of my life."
Gunter stepped down as director of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in 1971, but he continued to work at the laboratory as professor of zoology and director emeritus until 1979 when he retired from active service to the state government of Mississippi at the age of 70. By the time of his retirement, the laboratory had grown tremendously from what it had been when he arrived in 1955, becoming a major marine research center. In 1971, it had a staff of 100 employees, technicians, and support personnel, including over 20 scientists and other professionals divided into 13 sections (botany, chemistry, data processing, ecological physiology, fisheries management, fisheries research and development, geology, library, microbiology, museum, noxious animals, parasitology, and public information), each with technical staff, aides, and a few supervised graduate students, as well as custodial workers, tradesmen, and groundskeepers to clean and maintain the building and grounds. Its summer field program had grown from an enrollment of 40 students in 1955 to 80 in 1971, and the laboratory's annual budget had increased from $25,000 in 1955 to about $1,000,000 – supplemented by about $500,000 per year in grants and contracts – in 1971, by which time it had become one of the best-known and most respected marine research laboratories on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Publications Gunter wrote over 330 scientific papers and scholarly and popular articles, covering every aspect of U.S. Gulf Coast fisheries, and his writings on the relationships of salinity and temperature to marine life in the northern Gulf of Mexico became standard college marine biology texts. In addition to his writings on fisheries, he wrote articles on a variety of other topics, such as the abilities and behaviors of shore birds, insects, and primroses. He became known among animal rights groups for an article he wrote for the journal Science in 1961 entitled "Painless Killing of Crabs and Other Large Crustaceans" in which he called the boiling of live lobsters "unnecessary torture."Gunter, Gordon, 1961, "Painless killing of crabs and other large crustaceans", Science, 133(3449):327
Some of his more important papers were:
"Notes on invasion of fresh water by fishes of the Gulf of Mexico, with special reference to the Mississippi- Atchafalaya river system." Copeia 1938(2):69-72. (1938) "Seasonal variations in abundance of certain estuarine and marine fishes in Louisiana, with particular reference to life histories." Ecological Monographs 8:3 13-346. (1938) "Relative numbers of shallow water fishes of the northern Gulf of Mexico, with some records of rare fishes from the Texas coast." The American Midland Naturalist 26: 194- 200.(1941)