The Living Laboratory

Professor of Biology

One of the Colleges’ greatest professors was also one of the first to study Seneca Lake

Before the geosciences department and the popular emphasis on environmental science that arose in the late-1960s, there was precious little "living lab" academic work on Seneca Lake or elsewhere. But there was Ted Odell.

Theodore T. Odell, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hobart (1920) who later received an honorary doctorate (1967), taught at the Colleges for 44 years and was curator of the biology museum at the time of his death in 1974. Like most HWS faculty members, he is remembered chiefly as a great teacher.

But Odell also pursued research on freshwater species. He spent his summers as the chief biologist with the state conservation department. In 1939, for example, he conducted a large piscatorial census on Irondequoit Bay, near Rochester.

On Seneca Lake, he concentrated on the food chain — specifically, the need to bulk up the middle ranges of the chain, such that the lake’s large game fish would prosper. His "Life History and Ecological Relationships of the Alewife in Seneca Lake, N.Y.," printed in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, considered this otherwise pedestrian brand of trash fish — not yet an inhabitant of Seneca — as a possible missing link.

The study proved prescient. Alewife (alosa pseudoharengus) are ubiquitous in Seneca Lake today, though you call them sawbellies. — D.C.

The Seneca Lake series was researched and written by Dana Cooke and Peter Rolph '85 — writer/editors in the Office of College Relations. Portions of the series also appear in the Fall '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at murad@hws.edu.