FROM MARINE ECOLOGY TO BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHY

Looking back from the 1990s it seems natural to view the work done in the Biologishe Anstalt Helgoland by Friedrich Heincke and his colleagu es, beginning in 1892, as marine ecology or marine biology, and that d one in Kiel, under Victor Hensen and Karl Brandt, as biological oceano graphy. But historical analysis shows this view to be untenable. Biolo gical oceanography, as a research category and a profession, does not appear until at least the 1950's. In the German tradition of marine re search, ''Ozeanographie'', originating in 19th century physical geogra phy, did not include the biological sciences. The categories ''Meeresk unde'' and ''Meeresforschung'' covered all aspects of marine research in Germany from the 1890's to the present day. ''Meeresbiologie'' Like that of Brandt, Heincke, and other German marine scientists, fitted c omfortably into these. But in North America no such satisfactory profe ssional or definitional structure existed before the late 1950's. G.A. Riley, one of the first biological oceanographers, fought against des criptive, nonquantitative American ecology. In 1951 he described biolo gical oceanography as the ''ecology of marine populations'', Linking i t with quantitative population ecology in the U.S.A. By the end of the 1960's the U.S. National Science Foundation had recognized biological oceanography as a research area supported separately from marine biol ogy. There was no need for the category ''biological oceanography'' in German marine science because its subject matter lay under the umbrel la of ''Meereskunde'' or ''Meeresforschung''. But in North America, bi ological oceanography - a fundamental fusion of physics and chemistry with marine biology - was created to give this marine science a status higher than that of the conceptually overloaded ecological sciences. The sociologists Durkheim and Mauss claimed in 1903 that, ''the classi fication of things reproduces the classification of men''; similarly, in science, the classification of professions reproduces the status th at their practitioners hope to achieve.