William N. Tavolga
This page honors Professor William N. Tavolga - pioneer in marine bioacoustics (and my doctoral mentor and great friend)
Bill, around 2013
Bill Tavolga
Over the course of his career, Professor William (Bill) Tavolga did pioneering work in a field now referred to as “marine bio-acoustics.” Indeed, the term was probably first used in the title of his 1964 book which was based on a meeting he organized in 1963 in Bimini, Bahamas.
Bill did imaginative and meticulous studies that helped define the field of marine bioacoustics, including investigators of acoustic behavior, sound production, and hearing. But, earlier in his career, Bill studied the embryology of fishes.
This page focuses on sharing Bill’s research. However, before he passed away, Bill started writing an autobiography. He never completed the book,, but he shared many chapters with me and they are often fascinating insights into the life and career of a brilliant scholar, teacher, mentor, and colleague. I share them unedited - in Bills own words. Fortunately, Bill wrote very well, and so these chapters are very readable.
Bill did one video interview for the Animal Behavior Society. You can see that here.
Bill also made a video about his work with the goby. You can see that video here.
Bill (year unknown) had a life-long fascnation with snakes, and kept them as pets.
Research and Publications
Click here to go to a list of Bill’s publications. Note that this list is not complete. Where I have links to published papers, they are indicated..
Development of the platyfish. From Tavolga (1949). This was part of Tavolga’s doctoral dissertation.
Bill examined the mechanisms of sound production in two species of marine catfish (Tavolga, 1962). This investigation involved studies of the sounds of the species as well as a magnificent anatomical investigation of the sound production mechanism.
Figure showing the staircase method to determine fish hearing sensitivity. From Tavolga and Wodinsky (1963). This paper, which investigated hearing in nine species of marine fish, is a true classic. It was the first to apply modern psychophysical methods to studying fish hearing (though earlier workers had used some variants of modern methods).
Bill told a wonderful story about this study. He and Jerry Wodinsky (now at Brandeis University) did the work in Bimini, the Bahamas. Jerry was adamant that all notes be taken in pencil. Bill thought this ridiculous, but complied. Coming home, Bill packed his notebooks in a suitcase with several newly purchased bottles of Beefeater gin. On getting home, Bill opened the case and found one of the bottles had broken, leaking gin all over the notebooks with the summer’s data. BUT, it turns out that while gin would have washed away pen, it had no effect on pencil. The graph lines on the pages were gone (ink!), but since the data were still there, Bill was able to easily use the data. (As an aside, as a graduate student, the first lesson I was taught by Bill, and one I’ve tried to impress on all of my students, was to take notes in something indelible!)
Male gobies in combat from Tavolga (1956). This is part of Bill’s extraordinary work on goby reproductive behavior where he meticulously documented the interactions between visual, acoustic, and chemical cues in the male-female interactions. Tavolga made a video of his goby research.
Marine Bioacoustics Books and Meetings
While investigators had been studying acoustics and marine animals for many years, it is reasonable to suggest that the real start of the field came in 1963 when Tavolga organized a meeting in Bimini, The Bahamas, called Marine BIoacoustics. This resulted in a classic publication of the same name in 1964 (below, left). This was followed by a second meeting of the same name in 1966 which took place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the papers of which were published in 1967 in Marine Bioacoustics II. (below, right). Tavolga described both meetings in an article in the journal Science and which can be found at this link (thanks to AAAS for providing open access to the article).. I was fortunate to attend the 1966 meeting as a graduate student and got to meet many of the lumenaries in the field. The TOC of the book can be found here. This meeting was immediately followed by a meeting organized by Phyllis Cahn at the Stern College for Women (Yeshiva University) entitled Lateral Line Detectors, published under the same name in 1967.
Title page of Marine Bioacoustics (1964).
Cover of Marine Bioacousics II (1967). The TOC is here.
Some links with information about Bill
In 1966, Bill was interviewed in his lab at the American Museum for a piece in The New Yorker. Here is the link, but you need a subscription to the magazine to see the whole piece.
Bill wrote a lovely short text on animal behavior which got a good review.
Bill wrote an article that discussed some of his research (2002)
Bill also wrote about his perspective on fish bioacoustics (1996)
Bill developed an early computer system to study fish hearing - the audio-ichthyotron,
Obituary from Sarasota newspaper
Obituary from Acoustics Today
Obituary from the Animal Behavior Society
In 1966, Bill and his colleague wrote a letter to Science about a forthcoming AAAS meeting in New York. They report on the “value” of such meetings with a most amusing historical quotation.
Bill had broad interests. He was a lover of great food and wine and a very accomplished pianist. In fact, his father, Vladimir Heifitz, was a noted composer and wanted Bill to become a concert pianist.
Bill at first was not interested in computers, but developed a great interest and became a skilled programmer. At one point he combined these skills with his total fluency in Russian (both of his parents were from Russia) and wrote the first Russian-language word processor which he called Volgawriter. Bill made Volgawriter commercially available and sold several hundred copies. The volgawriter.com link is now owned by someone else, but the site is archived here. I may have the only remaining copy of the software, if anyone wants a copy (though it was written perhaps 20 years ago and I suspect it will not work on modern computers - and it was written for DOS-based systems)!
Material Related to Bill
Bill’s doctoral advisor was the great American ichthyologist Charles M. Breder, jr. Dr. Breder was a brilliant scientist with amazing observational skills. Much of his material, including diaries, were donated to the Mote Marine Lab. Dr. Ernie Estevez from Mote kindly provided me with a copy of a document that describes a bit of Dr. Breder’s work that is fun to read.
Pictures of Bill Tavolga
Eugenie Clark
Eugenie Clark and Bill Tavolga, 2010
Eugenie Clark and Bill Tavolga became good friends, along with Bill’s wife Margaret, when all three were in graduate school at New York University in the late 1940’s. (Read Bill’s chapter on Margaret.) Genie and the Tavolga’s became life-long friends. Indeed, Bill was the first scientist (that I know of) to work at Cape Haze Marine laboratory when Genie founded it, and he stayed part of the lab till his death. In about 1965 Bill persuaded Genie to join the faculty of City College of New York (CCNY) where he was professor.. I was in one of the first classes she taught, and you can see a picture of our research cruise here.
Later, Genie left CCNY and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland (UMD). In 1987 I became chair of Zoology at UMD and Genie’s “boss.” She thought it was great that her former student became her boss - trouble was, I could never treat Genie as anything but a very revered teacher and mentor - she was a joy to have as a colleague.
American Museum of Natural History
Tavolga in 1969 at American Museum of Natural History. Much of Bill’s work was done at AMNH
Though Bill was on the faculty of City College of New York, his research was conducted at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). In fact, Bill started at AMNH in the herpetology department (he had a fascination with snakes and even had a pet snake for many years) as a high school student and then moved to Ichthyology. But the bulk of his research was in the fabled Department of Animal Behavior.
Tavolga in 2005
Bill’s office and lab at AMNH were on the 6th floor, up a spiral staircase. (The alternate route up was on a very large freight elevator.) The department was an amazing place, with stellar faculty and a cadre of great graduate students. Bill’s office attached to that of Professor T. C. Schneirla, the world renowned developmental psychologist.. Other fracu;ty in the department at the time were Ethel Tobach and Lester Aronson.
Fish BioAcoustics Meeting, 2001
Bill Tavolga with my lab group at a meeting in 2001.. From left to right: Xiaohong Deng, Michaela Meyer, Dennis Plachta, John Ramcharitar and his wife, Bill Tavolga, Mike Smith, Allison Coffin, Dennis Higgs, and me.
In 2001 we held a fish bioacoustics meeting in Evanston, Il. We chose to honor three of the luminaries of the field - Per Enger (Norway), Art Myrberg (Miama, Fl), and Bill Tavolga. What was most pleasing was that many of my students and postdocs got to meet Bill for the first time, and I am not sure who was more delighted - Bill (to meet his “grandstudents”) or the students.
Home in Sarasota
Bill and his wife Margaret bought a home in Sarasota Florida to spend summers at the Cape Haze Marine Lab (now Mote Marine Lab). In the early 1970’s, when Bill retired from CCNY and Margaret from Farleigh Dickinson University (where she was professor of biology), they moved permanently to this home at 5151 Windward Ave. After Margaret passed away, Bill moved to the “mainland.” of Sarasota since this house was so close to water and he was concerned about flooding. The house no longer stands.
When Bill was at AMNH he had funding from the US Navy. They insisted he have a secure safe to keep secret information. Bill tried to explain that fish sounds generally did not communicate secrets, but the bureaucrats insisted. So, Bill had this massive filing cabinet with a giant combination lock - in which he kept his lunch. When Bill moved to Sarasota, the AMNH did not want the filing cabinet and so it was moved and bolted into the stone floor of the house. In Sarasota, the safe was used for Margaret’s collection of jewelry, much of which she designed herself.
Perry Gilbert, then director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, Margaret Tavolga, and Bill Tavolga in 1968.
Bill and Margaret Tavolga at their Sarasota home in 1972.
Bill Tavolga, Dick Fay, and Art Popper at a meeting we organized on fish bioacoustics in 1981 at Mote Marine Laboratory
Bill talking with Dick Fay (right) and Per Enger (left) in 1981 at Mote Marine Lab meeting
Bill Tavolga, Art Popper, and Tony Hawkins at meeting in 2013
Margaret and Bill Tavolga at lunch at 1981 meeting.
Margaret was an amazing and wonderful person, and someone very dear to my whole family. She and Bill met in graduate school at NYU. She continued her research for a number of years and did wonderful work on epimeletic behavior of dolphins.
However, Margaret’s true love was teaching, and she was a brilliant instructor. She was on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University (in New Jersey) where she was professor (and for many years, chair) of biology.
Once Bill and Margaret moved to Sarasota permanently, she got engaged in several “hobbies,” though when Margaret took on something she became a true expert. One “hobby” involved gems, and she became an expert on opals. Another was orchids. She had an amazing orchid collection in their home, and worked for many years as the orchid expert at the Selby Gardens in Sarasota.
Bill was fortunate to have two great loves in his life. After Margaret passed away, Bill met Paula John who had retired to Sarasota.
Paula had had a long career in administration at Antioch College, culminating as Registrar when it expanded into an international university. She then joined her neighbor Gary Klein in founding Klein Associates, a firm of cognitive psychologists doing research and development in expert decision making under stress.
Bill and Paula remained “sweethearts” until Bill died. I thank Paula, a dear friend of ours, for providing some of the material for this page. She now resides in Vancouver, WA near her son.