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Contact Info
Home Town Watertown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Last Address Arlington National Cemetery
Date of Passing Nov 03, 1995
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
Dr. R. Tucker Abbott Mr. Seashell WWII U.S. Navy Dive Bomber Pilot
Bureau of Medicine Research Scientest
Robert Tucker Abbott (September 28, 1919 – November 3, 1995) was an American conchologist and malacologist. He was the author of more than 30 books on malacology, which were translated into many languages.
Abbott was one of the most prominent conchologists of the 20th century. He brought conchology to the public with his works, including most notably: American Seashells, 1974, Seashells of the World, 1962, and The Kingdom of the Seashell, 1972. He was an active member of the American Malacological Union and Conchologists of America.
Biography
R. Tucker Abbott was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. His interest in seashells began early; he collected them as a boy and started a museum with a friend in his basement. After having spent part of his youth in Montreal, he went to Harvard University and became a student of William (Bill) James Clench (1897–1984). In 1941, they started the journal Johnsonia, which specialized in western Atlantic molluscs. He graduated in 1942.
During World War II, Abbott was first a Navy bomber pilot, and later worked for the Medical Research Unit doing research on schistosomiasis. He documented the life cycle of the schistosome in the Oncomelania, a small brown freshwater snail, which he studied in the rice fields of the Yangtze valley.
He married Mary M. Sisler on February 18, 1946. She was also a malacologist.
After World War II, Abbott worked at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (1944–1954) as Assistant Curator and Associate Curator of the Department of Mollusks. During this time, he earned his Master's and Ph.D. at George Washington University and wrote the first edition of American Seashells.
He then went to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (1954–1969). He was chair of the Department of Mollusks, and held the Pilsbry Chair of Malacology. During that time he went on a number of shelling expeditions to the Indo-Pacific region. He also started his own journal, "Indo-Pacific Mollusca". He also was an active editor on "The Nautilus"
In 1969, Abbott accepted the DuPont Chair of Malacology at the Delaware Museum of Natural History. He also headed the Department of Mollusks, and was Assistant Director. In 1971 he became editor-in-chief of "The Nautilus".
Abbott was the Founding Director of The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum on Sanibel Island. He died from pulmonary disease in 1995, two weeks before the museum opened. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Other Comments:
WWII Dive Bomber Pilot,
Research Scientest and Author of more
than 30 books on conchology and malacology
For most people of his generation, the War Years represented a break in their careers, a time-out from life. For Tucker Abbott it was time-in, a chance to do some malacological research and make a difference in the war effort. After a two-year stint as a Navy dive bomber pilot, he was attached to a Medical Research Unit. The first medical malacologist in history, he was set the task of conquering schistosomiasis, a fatal blood fluke disease that would threaten our troops in the Pacific. His studies took him to Baltimore and Bethesda, to Guam and the Marianas, and finally to the rice fields of China's Yangtze Valley in a makeshift lab in an ambulance strapped to a railroad flatcar, where he discovered the life cycle of the schistosome in an 8mm-long brown freshwater snail called Oncomelania. Here was the cause for schistosomiasis. His discovery saved countless lives.
After two years as a WWII Navy Bomber Pilot (1942-1944), Lt. R. T. Abbot H(S), USNR, was assigned to the United States Navy Medical Research Unit no. 2. His research extended into the 1950's, he is therefore listed as WWII and Korean War.
In May 1945, three naval officers comprising an epidemiological team from Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2, located on Guam, came to Leyte. Since only 16 proved cases of schistosomiasis had appeared among Navy personnel, no extensive investigations were planned by this group.
The Subcommission on Schistosomiasis, the Malaria Research Unit together with the 5th Malaria Survey Detachment, and the Navy epidemiological team each planned and carried on their own respective investigational programs. There was some imperfection in the collaboration of the three groups, but cooperative projects were developed by the Subcommission in association with the 5th Malaria Survey Detachment and the Malaria Research Unit and by one member of the Navy team in association with the Army research groups. The latter were most fortunate in having Lt. R. Tucker Abbott of the Navy team, an expert on mollusks, work with them, for until the time of Lt. Abbott's arrival on Leyte there had been no one who could identify snails found in the fresh waters of the island.
The Army and Navy groups remained on Leyte until after the war ended in September. In late October, some of the members of the Subcommission on Schistosomiasis and the commanding officer of the Medical Research Unit proceeded to Japan, where studies were made of the distribution of the disease and its intensity in the natives in endemic areas.
Dr. Robert Tucker Abbott Mr. Seashell U.S. Navy WWII
Published in The New York Times on Nov. 9 1995
Dr. R. Tucker Abbott, the master of mollusks who was better known as Mr. Seashell, died on Friday at his home on Sanibel Island, Fla., where he was director of the new Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum. He was 77 and also lived in Melbourne, Fla.
Museum officials said the cause was a stroke.
In a career that included scholarly stints at the Smithsonian Institution, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Delaware Museum of Natural History in Wilmington, Dr. Abbott turned out his share of learned books and authoritative papers.
And while ranging the world from Samoa to Zanzibar, wading rice paddies in China and scouring shorelines on Fiji or the Philippines, he personally discovered some 1,000 of the estimated 100,000 species of mollusks, the soft-bodied invertebrates that are the malacologist's stock in trade.
The work earned him a world reputation among fellow scientists. But for all his intimate knowledge of clams, conchs, oysters, snails, squids and slugs, it was his special weakness for mollusks' delicately shaped, multicolored shells that brought Dr. Abbott fame.
His definitive guide, "American Sea Shells," first published in the 1954, has been credited with turning a casual hobby into an organized mania, one that Dr. Abbott did his best to satisfy through an outpouring of some 30 follow-up books, ranging from pocket-size field guides to coffee-table tomes.
He found the demand for seashell books so insatiable that he left the Delaware museum in 1977 and moved to Melbourne to form his own publishing company, American Malacologists Inc., now operated by his daughter, Cynthia Sullivan, in Andover, Mass.
Dr. Abbott, who shared his readers' awe at the beauties of nature, traced his interest in science to the time he first picked up a shell, on a beach on Cape Cod when he was 4 years old.
By the time he was a teen-ager, Dr. Abbott, a native of Lynn, Mass., who spent his high school years in Montreal, was such a rabid collector that he and a friend opened a science museum in his basement. "I was curator of botany, birds and shells," he once told an interviewer, recalling that he and his friend had pedaled 2,000 miles on a collecting expedition.
He returned home so determined to become a malacologist, he said, that even though he had flunked ninth grade, he buckled down and made it into Harvard.
There, the malacologist William J. Clench became his mentor and sent him on to the Smithsonian in Washington. He eventually received his master's degree and doctorate from George Washington University.
By then, however, Dr. Abbott had already established a successful malacology research station -- on Guam, where his work was instrumental in stemming an outbreak of a parasitic disease traced to snails during World War II.
Since 1989, Dr. Abbott, inevitably wearing sneakers and a seashell print shirt and frequently entangled in the two pairs of glasses he wore around his neck, had become a familiar figure on the beaches of Sanibel, the barrier island near Fort Myers known as a treasure trove of shells.
The museum that he helped organize and stock with two million shells representing 20,000 species of mollusks open there on Nov. 18.1995, just two weeks after his death.
