David Henry Cushing. 14 March 1920 — 14 March 2008

Abstract

David Cushing was Britain's foremost twentieth-century marine fisheries ecologist, who did more than anyone else to develop the subject into a distinctive science over a career of more than 50 years. He was born and raised in Northumberland, and took both his first degree and a DPhil at Oxford, separated by war service in the Royal Artillery. He married Diana Antona-Traversi in 1943, and they had one daughter, Camilla. He worked for the whole of his career at the Fisheries Laboratory, Lowestoft, where he started in 1946 as a scientific officer, studying plankton off the northeast coast of England, and eventually becoming deputy director and head of the Fish Population Dynamics Divi­sion until his retirement in 1980. He published around 200 papers and reports, and wrote 11 books on marine ecology and fisheries, with four principal areas of interest: fisheries acoustics; planktonic biological production in the sea; the causes of the collapse of the North Sea herring; and the factors controlling recruitment of young fish, notably the influences of stock size and of climate. He famously proposed the match/mismatch hypothesis to explain how the great variability of fish recruitment arises from minor variations in climate from year to year. He died on 14 March 2008, on his eighty-eighth birthday.