Retired marine biologist attempts to
establish new algal order

By Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

Robert Wilce (Stan Sherer photo)

ore than a dozen years after retiring from his career as a professor of Biology, Robert Wilce has received a National Science Foundation grant to study brown algae in the Arctic. Wilce, 78, will travel to Ragged Channel, off the northern tip of Canada's Baffin Island to dive into 28-degree water and collect samples of the seaweed in September.

     Wilce is no stranger to the area, having made three previous trips to Ragged Channel to study the organisms.

     "You go to an Inuit village and you get a guide and a small boat and you dive - sometimes through a crack in the ice - or dredge and collect seaweed," he said. Wilce will receive more than $50,000 from the NSF for the study, which he expects to result in the discovery of a new order.

     "Most of this type of work involves establishing species and genera," Wilce said. "It's really unusual to establish an order. All the recognized brown algal orders in the North Atlantic Ocean were described by the turn of the last century."

    Wilce said that identifying a new order used to be based on issues of structure and reproduction. Recently, however, molecular data have become an important part of the process. Enter Gary Saunders of the University of New Brunswick, "one of two or three North American scientists who excel in the field," who will provide DNA analysis of the two species of algae Wilce is studying for signs that they can be classified in a new order. Saunders and one of his graduate students will accompany Wilce and one of his former students on the expedition.

     "We're going to dive to collect and study the population in situ, where it grows," he said. We'll prepare it and bring it back to the lab to learn more about structure and reproduction [of the algae]. Then we'll write a paper."

     Wilce said the week-long stay in the Arctic will be rigorous in mid-September. Ice may have begun to form and, although the water below 15 feet under the surface is a constant 28 degrees, the air temperature above ground has an impact on the comfort of the scientists while they aren't underwater.

    He described diving through ice cracks as "not pleasant" and said that the gear and the atmosphere only allow for two hours of diving per day.

     "It's really troublesome to fill the tanks [with air using a compressor], so you want to make the most of each dive. We don't dive deep - 50 or 60 feet - because if anything happens, we're out of luck. You dive in the morning, you fill the tanks with a compressor, you dive in the afternoon. At night you work with the specimens."

    The only danger in the area, he said, is from polar bears who sometimes are interested in human's food.

    "We can't carry rifles, but the Inuit can," he said.

    Although Wilce retired in 1990, he works at his lab and office "pretty much all the time."

     The trip will be his 19th to the Arctic, which he has seen in Alaska, the north and west coasts of Greenland, the Russo-Finnish border, and the Canadian Archipelago.

     Wilce credits his career success to three things: "hard work, serendipity, and the right mentor and the right time."

    Returning disabled from the European Theater of World War II, where he had served as a parachutist, in 1945, he used the GI Bill to make his way into higher education.

     "I didn't really have any academic tendencies," he said. "But I had good mentors."

    One saw him through a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Scranton, another through a master's degree in botany at the University of Vermont, and a third at the University of Michigan, where he received a doctorate from Michigan in marine biology.

     At 79, he will take on his final graduate student next January, he said.

    "There won't be time for more," he said. "There's too much I want to do."