Pioneers of plankton research: Enrique Balech (1912–2007)
International audience 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: | Journal of Plankton Research |
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| Main Author: | |
| Other Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
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HAL CCSD
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hal.science/hal-03741940 https://hal.science/hal-03741940/document https://hal.science/hal-03741940/file/Balech_HAL.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/plankt/fbac041 |
| Summary: | International audience 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 (Akelsman et al. 2008), Balech was actually much more than dinoflagellate taxonomist. He was a pioneer of plankton research in South America. While he was not the first in South American to publish on plankton (e.g., Faria and Cunha, 1917), Balech appears to have been the first career planktologist. In 1938, at age 26, he published his first paper on euglenoid flagellates of the freshwater plankton (Balech and Dastugue, 1938). His last paper appeared nearly 7 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. When suspicions among the crew grew that Balech was the artist, he posted a picture of himself to deflect attention. Here, an attempt is made to introduce Enrique Balech, both his life and his work, to the plankton researchers of today. First, an account of the interesting life and career path of ... |
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