Faculty Scholarship Profile: Richard Eakin

imageRichard Eakin has been recognized not only by his colleagues, but also by ABCNews.com in a story in 1999, as “the world’s foremost authority on the family of Antarctic fish known as Artedidraconidae, or plunderfish.”

Over the past quarter century, Eakin, a professor of biology, has published more than 15 papers on Antarctic fish and has discovered more than 10 new species of the strange bottom-dwellers that live in Antarctic waters with temperatures about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees colder than what we normally think of as the freezing point.

Prof. Eakin’s plunderfish are related to American perch. But he describes these Antarctic bottom dwellers are “couch potatoes.” They sit on the bottom and let their prey come to them. “If you’re a bottom fish and you sit and wait to ambush your prey,” Prof. Eakin explains, “you’re going to have a big wide mouth and a quick reflex to grab that prey, and you’re going to sit there and digest it for a few days and your lifestyle is a very sluggish one. You’re also going to have big bulging eyes to see when your prey comes near.”

The plunderfish also have a strange appendage, known as a barbel, that extends from their chin. If you pinch the end of the barbel with a tweezers, there is a reflex reaction where the mouth opens and closes quickly, as if it were trying to bite whatever is biting the barbel. It probably acts as a bait, similar to the worm a fisherman puts on his hook.

On first seeing these rather homely fish, people often say they look “primitive,” but Prof. Eakin explains that these fish are actually rather recent and quite advanced on the evolutionary chain. They have only been around about 65 million years, compared to hundreds of millions of years for most fish, and they evolved in very specialized ways to fill a narrow ecological niche.

Prof. Eakin grew up in Sharon, Pa.. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in zoology at the University of Maine, Orono, and his B.S. in biology at Westminster College in Pennsylvania.

He got hooked on his specialty at the University of Maine at Orono where he met the late Professor Hugh Dewitt, who was one of two experts in the world on Antarctic fish.

Besides work in the Antarctic, Prof. Eakin has also spent sabbatical semesters in Hamburg, Tasmania and Ohio, working with collections of these fish and colleagues in his field. But Prof. Eakin gets most of his fish specimens from people who continue to send him fish they have found in the Antarctic, wanting to know what the fish are.

“Fortunately for me, there are expeditions from around the world—Russians, Germans, Australians, Americans and others—who are catching fish and sending them to me because I’ve built up a reputation over the years,” he explains.

A Russian colleague has recognized Prof. Eakin’s contributions to the field by naming one of the Antarctic fish Pogonophryne eakini Balushkin in his honor.

Although Prof. Eakin has made his international reputation on fish, he is better known in southern Maine for birds. He is active in Maine’s birding community and speaks frequently about birds to various organizations with accompanying slide shows. He is also a wildlife artist, specializing in watercolor paintings and pen-and-ink drawings of birds. He has had several exhibitions of his work on display at various venues over the years.    
Admissions FAQs
     

Back to Top

 
» Advanced Search