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| Maude Delap, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024 |
This year for Ada Lovelace Day I thought I would write about a woman outside of academic science who lived far from centres of learning: self-taught trail-blazing Irish marine biologist Maude Jane Delap (1866 – 1953)* who was the first person to successfully breed jellyfish in captivity and document their full lifecycle, something extraordinarily hard to do. To this day, her work is still cited in laboratory manuals for jellyfish rearing. She also discovered a sea anemone named in her honour, Edwardsia delapiae. She became a respected independent research scientist despite her distance from universities and research institutions, making an extensive study of plankton over many years from her remote location on Valentia Island offshore Ireland's west coast. Further, she did this despite society's and specifically her father's attitudes about the roles of women. In my portrait she is surrounded by different stages in the blue jellyfish (Cyanea lamarckii) based on her own illustrations of her published research.
Born the seventh of ten children to Rev Alexander Delap and Anna Jane (née Goslett) in Templecrone Rectory, County Donegal, Maude moved with her family to Valentia Island at age 8. Her father had been assigned to the parishes of Valentia and Cahersiveen, and, a keen sailor, he sailed around the coast with two of her brothers. Their possessions, following in a second boat, arrived a little worse for wear. Her mother and the rest of the children travelled by train. While the girls had less formal education than their brothers, they had some progressive primary school education and their naturalist father encouraged Maude and her sister Constance (1868–1935) in their interest in biology and zoology. He himself had published articles in the Irish Naturalist and the whole family were avid naturalists. Maude and Constance became prolific collectors of marine specimen, many of which are still housed by the Natural History Museum, Dublin. Maude and her sister got reports from visiting fishermen of interesting species in all the their catch, for which they would pay a few shillings, encouraging what is now often known as "citizen science" or "community science" (to avoid the political overtones of the word "citizen"). They were sometimes invited aboard to observe finds and jellyfish. Since the family enjoyed boating and fishing, Maude and Constance learned how to handle a boat and would row out alone, exploring the coast and caves. The Fisheries Board granted them part-time access to their steam boat for their research.
The sisters' work lead to a survey by the Royal Irish Academy headed by Edward T. Browne of University College London in 1895 and 1896. Browne was particularly interested in plankton, the floating marine organisms ranging in size from microbes to large jellyfish, which are often the basis of the food chain and indicative of ocean health. Maude and Constance continued with their systematic study, gathering specimen of often tiny jellyfish and plankton by dredging and tow-netting, as well as recording sea temperature and changes in marine life for 28 years! They brought specimen back to the lab to identify and sketch them. Maude's patience, attention to detail, skill with her microscope and as an artist allowed her to document microscopic details of jellyfish structures and organs. Maude corresponded with Browne for forty years until his death in 1937. It's speculated that she had fallen in love with him; it was unrequited and he married a colleague. She sent him a box of violets she grew in her garden each year for his birthday. Browne thanked both sisters in his publications and jointly published research with Maude.
Maude became fascinated by the life cycle of jellyfish. She painstakingly developed a means of keeping them alive in captivity - something which other scientists had struggled and failed to achieve. She determined their diet, at each stage of development, through trial and error and explained the paramount role proper diet plays in being able to keep them in captivity. She changed the water daily, adjusting temperature to match that in the habour, where they thrived, and carefully monitored the jellyfish. She was the first person to breed them successfully in her home laboratory. The life cycle of the jellyfish is unusual: an adult medusa can procreate by producing a planuala (or egg), which implants on a surface like the seafloor and grows into a polyp (which looks a little like a plant rooted in the ground). The polyp can grow into a budding polyp. This stage of the cycle can go either direction; in less than optimal conditions the budding polyp can revert to the polyp stage. In optimal conditions the budding polyp will bud off ephyrae and these eventually grow into adult medusae. Previous to Delap's work, these various stages could be misinterpreted as separate species. She bred four species of jellyfish including Chrysaora isosceles (the compass jellyfish) and Cyanea lamarckii (the blue jellyfish shown in my print) and documented their life cycles and feeding habits and published her results. Her trailblazing research was the first identification of the various life cycle stages (medusa and hydra) that belong to which species. Quite unusually for a woman at the time, Maude published several influential scientific papers under her own name: she published six articles, and three short notes, including two co-authored by Constance. Thanks to her contributions to marine biology she was offered a position in 1906 at the Plymouth Marine Biological Station in England. She declined the job; her father had apparently declared, "No daughter of mine will leave home, except as a married woman." While this lost opportunity must have been an immense disappointment, she continued her work at home. Leaving Valentia, and her sisters, at age 40 might also have been quite a daunting prospect. Staying in Valentia allowed her to produce her incredible lengthy study of Valentia harbour, and support her unmarried sisters for the rest of their lives, growing and fishing for food and earning income from selling flowers from her garden.
When her father died later that year, the her mother, two sisters and Maude moved out of the Parsonage and were permitted to use Reenellen House by the Knight of Kerry. There, they hosted many guests including friends, family, visiting scientists and naturalists, and fishermen seeking safety and shelter in bad weather. While remote, Valentia was home to a telegraph station which was the European terminus for the trans-Atlantic cable, a weather station and an observatory, which did lead to a number of visiting engineers, scientists and marine biologist. The Delap sisters were highly-regarded members of their community, who helped run the local cottage hospital and fisherman's hall, known for their charity and generosity but also for wearing outdated Edwardian clothes, both for propriety and economic necessity. Her nephews recalled going fishing in the evening to feed all the guests, along with fruits and vegetables they grew in the garden. They set up a laboratory they fondly dubbed "The Department" which was described by her nephew as an "heroic jumble of books, specimens, aquaria, with its pervasive low-tide smell." Aquaria contained not only jellyfish, but fish, starfish and even a thornback ray Maude reared from an egg. She buried dead marine vertebrates in her garden to recover their skeletons.
In 1920, as the official whale-stranding officer for south west Ireland, appointed by the British Museum and the local contact for interesting wildlife, she was alerted to a stranded 16-foot whale on the rocks beyond the lighthouse. So she rowed out with her handyman, and she correctly identified a rare True's beaked whale, only previously been known from an incomplete US specimen. Unable to save it, she sent its head and flippers (on request) to the Natural History Museum and buried the rest in her garden. The Museum later requested the rest of the skeleton, causing her to dig up her asparagus garden to gather them. The Museum wrote again that two tiny vestigial pelvic bones were missing so Maude dug up her garden again and sieved the soil until she received a telegram from the Museum which read, “Stop! New York Museum informs us that True’s beaked whale does not possess vestigial pelvic bones."
In 1928, she found a previously undescribed sea anemone burrowing deep into the eelgrass. Named in her honour, the Burrowing Sea Anemone (Edwardsia delapiae) has only been observed in Valentia habour. In 1936, she was made an associate of the Linnean Society of London. In 1937 she was made an associate member of the Marine Biological Association. She submitted specimen and corresponded with the Natural History Museum from 1894 until 1949, when she was 83. Like her father before her, she submitted observations to Dr Scully’s “Flora and Fauna of Kerry” and both are acknowledged in the text. Maude was also interested in folklore, geology, botany and archaeology and she published several papers in the Kerry Archaeological Magazine. Her grand-nephew recalled Maude, the "old-school Victorian all-round naturalist”, saying, “Wherever we went, she was instantly recognized and greeted with delight”. She died in 1953, and was buried alongside her sisters near Knightstown, Valentia Island, County Kerry. There is now a plaque from the Irish National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology to commemorate her and her work, on the island.
*I have written previously about Delap's life and work here.
References,
Byrne, Patricia M. Delap, Maude Jane. Dictionary of Irish Biography.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002516.v1 M. J. Delap. 1905. Notes on the rearing, in an aquarium of Cyanea Lamarcki, Peron et Lesueur. Annual report of Fisheries, Ireland 1902-03. II (I(ii)) 20-22.
Maude Delap, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2024.
Muka, Samantha Kay. Maude Delap: Jellyfish Goddess of the North Atlantic, Through the Aquarium Glass blog, October 29, 2012.
Sheehan, Jane. Finding Maude Delap, LIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum blog, accessed January, 2024
Sheehan, Jane. Finding Maude Delap, Online Lunchetime Talk, LIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum, YouTube, February 11, 2022.
Sheehan, Jane. Maude Delap Heritage Trail. 27 July 2023. (Accessed January 2024)
