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National Geographic Special Collections: Archives & Film Preservation Blog

Jocelyn Crane's Study on Fiddler Crabs (1958-59)

by Karen Cerka on 2024-03-08T12:55:00-05:00 | 0 Comments

 

It was a historic moment when Jocelyn Crane received a National Geographic Society grant in 1959, as she was the first woman recipient.  Her grant was titled  “Morphology, behavior, and ecology of fiddler crabs and their relations,” and the description:  “Group phylogeny and evolution of mechanisms for feeding, defense, and display will be investigated.  Special attention will be paid to sympatric species, to species of wide geographic range, and to evidences of primitive social organization.”

 

Jocelyn Crane started her career as a laboratory assistant at the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) to fellow NGS grantee, William Beebe, most known for the Bathysphere expedition in 1934.  It was that same year that Crane began to publish her own articles about deep sea organisms for the New York Zoological Society, and in 1938 her study shifted towards crabs, over 200 species of them, that year alone.  Her research on crabs would culminate in her 1975 publication titled, Fiddler crabs of the world.  

How did Jocelyn Crane become interested in studying specifically fiddler crabs you may wonder?  She recounts in the acknowledgement section of her book, “One warm. December morning William Beebe, John Tee-Van [also part of the Bathysphere expedition team], and I were walking along the shore of a small and lonely bay in Costa Rica, binoculars at the ready.  The white beach was suitably fringed with green and out in the turquoise water three pelicans were fishing.  It was obviously the kind of place you dream about when it is cold up north, and gray, and you are waiting for a bus.  Suddenly, on a muddy patch ahead, we saw a crowd of tiny creatures,  each brandishing a great claw that flashed in the sun. We froze motionless.  ‘What…?’ I asked, and Will said shortly, ‘Fiddlers, of course,’ shocked that an assistant of his didn’t know.  And that, more than thirty years ago, was really the beginning of this book.  I was hooked on fiddler crabs.” (xxi)

The clip above documents Jocelyn Crane at work studying fiddler crabs at William Beebe's Simla Field Research Station in Trinidad, and below she is featured in the Nomination Page of the October 1959 issue of the National Geographic Magazine:

 

 

While at the Simla Station, she also studied butterflies, photos below, and wrote an article describing the research for the August 1957 NGM.

 

 

Photos and motion picture film by NGS Staff Photographer M. Woodbridge Williams

 


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