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Drawing Science From the Sea

September 19, 2017

Pioneering marine biologist Henry Bryant Bigelow served as the founding director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 1930 to 1939. Almost three decades earlier, when Bigelow was an undergraduate at Harvard University, he went on his first oceanographic expedition, traveling to the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean with the director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Alexander Agassiz. That voyage sparked Bigelow’s passion for oceanography. On the cruise, Bigelow was responsible for collecting and documenting gelatinous animals such as this jellyfish, whose drawing he included in his 1904 article “Medusae from the Maldive Islands.”  (Illustration by Henry B. Bigelow, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)