Ransom A. Myers

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Dr. Ransom Aldrich Myers, Jr. (known as Ram), born 13 June 1952 in Lula, Mississippi, died 27 March 2007 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a world-renowned marine biologist and conservationist. He was the son of cotton planter, Ransom Aldrich Myers, Sr. and Fay A. Mitchell Myers. At age 16, in 1968, Myers won an international science fair for building an "X-ray crystallograph" which measured the symmetry of atoms. ^[1]

Myers graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from Rice University in 1974 followed by an M.Sc. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dalhousie University. Before joining the faculty of Dalhousie University in 1997 as the first Killam Chair in Ocean Studies, he was a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans in St. John's, Newfoundland. ^[2]

Myers was best known for his passionate warnings on the worldwide overfishing of the fish stocks in the oceans in particular the Atlantic cod and the Southern bluefin tuna. As a member of the IUCN shark specialist group, he collected also data about the decline of shark populations and directed the focus of the media on threatened shark species. One of Myer's most important areas of research was stock recruitment: collection and analysis of data and the subsequent development of models to predict the survival rate for fish larvae.

In the October 2005 issue of Fortune Myers was listed among the world's ten people to watch for "working to develop new and better ways to husband the wealth beneath the sea." ^[3]

On March 27, 2007 he died in Halifax, Nova Scotia from a brain tumor.