R. J. Conover, "Bob", 1927-2011

I first meet Bob in Halifax sometime in 1967/8. I was a graduate student studying deep-sea plankton at Dalhousie University and shared a lab space with his wife Shirley Conover. At a coffee break, with our conversation centered on canoeing the backwoods of Nova Scotia, Shirley asked me to please take her husband with us. It was a little daunting to include such an eminent zooplankton ecologist. I was, at the time, apprehensive about passing the dreaded comprehensive exams. However Bob Conover turned out to be just as, if not more, casually dressed as a graduate student with absolutely no airs about him. This encounter led to a life-long friendship. Bob was immediately at the forefront of his field with the publication of his doctorate from Yale in 1955 under the guidance of Gordon R. Riley. Gordon was also my PhD supervisor so I know that Bob developed his own thesis. Gordon firmly believed that the supervisor's role was to assist, not direct, students so they would be able to succeed once they graduated. Bob's thesis dealt with understanding the physiological and ecological underpinnings that enabled two sympatric copepods to coexist or share the coastal waters of Long Island Sound (Conover, 1956). He continued his research on the feeding physiology of copepods at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Plymouth, UK, until the late 1960s and made a major advance in a paper on the assimilation of food by copepods (Conover, 1966) which was adopted by the scope-for-growth movement to detect sublethal effects of stress and toxicants. Both these papers became citation classics. In the fall of 1966, he took a position at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Dartmouth, NS, to join the utopian Marine Ecology Laboratory of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. This group was assembled under the leadership of Lloyd Dickie to tackle environmental and fisheries issues with the diverse expertise of fisheries' biologists and oceanographers. Bob, together with his postdocs and collaborators, flourished while furthering our understanding of the feeding and digestive physiology of various plankters and their role in the ecosystem (Conover and Lalli, 1974; Conover, 1978; Conover and Mazaud, 1984; Head et al., 1984; Conover et al., 1986; Wang and Conover, 1986; Mayzaud and Conover, 1988; Matsakis and Conover, 1991). In the late 1980s, Bob took his interest in plankton to the arctic where he continued to be at the forefront of his field. During his career, he coauthored many publications with younger scientists who went on to become leaders in the field (Conover and Cota, 1985; Harrison et al., 1985; Conover et al., 1988, 1995, 1999; Conover and Huntley, 1991; Siferd and Conover, 1992; Welch et al., 1992; Conover and Siferd, 1993; Grebmeier et al., 1995; Conover and Gustavson, 1999). Bob loved travelling and gave scientific papers around the world. He retired from BIO in 1994 at the highest ranking for a research scientist. Bob and Shirley purchased a 50-acre farm near Bewdley, Ontario, to be near the largest number of grandchildren. He got into organic gardening and personally sold his produce at the local county market. This did not drastically alter his taxation status. Being a true scientist, Bob continued to publish arctic papers during the winter months until the spring when trout fishing and gardening took priority, but when fall rolled around he jumped into his pickup truck for salmon fishing in his beloved Nova Scotia. There are very few streams or lake chains in Nova Scotia that Bob and I have not paddled and fished together. Bob suffered a series of mini-strokes in the late 2000s that cost him his driver license. This did not stop him from his biennial visits to Nova Scotia to fish trout in the spring and salmon in the fall. It was indeed fortunate that Via Rail passes through Cobourg, Ontario. His fatal stroke occurred in July of 2011. Bob will be remembered as a very warm person with a disarming smile. He always went out of his way to assist others. He patiently rewrote foreign submissions if he thought them important during his long term as an assistant editor for Marine Ecology Progress Series. He did have an explosive temper and the vocabulary of a mariner, which, fortunately, was rare, fleeting and directed at the inanimate. This usually involved some inadequacy of his manual dexterity or malfunctioning equipment. Strangely, Bob was the last man standing at sea during a blow. I can remember him happily humming his otherworldly music, doing things with his precious Calanus in glass beakers and rolling with the waves from one instrument to another. He appeared to be blessed with an immunity to motion sickness. Bob and Shirley were great supporters of the arts and frequented Neptune Theatre and Symphony NS in Halifax, which religiously continued with the Toronto venues. Bob, with all his eccentricities, drooping Tilley hat, tweed jacket, Vic's cough drops and otherworldly humming, will be resolutely missed by his friends and colleagues in Halifax.

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