Biography

U.S. ichthyologist and lichenologist. Herre spent the 1920s as Chief of Fisheries in the Philippines and later served as Curator of Ichthyology at Stanford University. He came to his two specialist subjects fairly late in life after a youth interrupted by family bereavements, but carried on his studies in fish and lichen taxonomy well into his old age.

Herre was born in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up mostly in Illinois, where his mother struggled to bring up three children after the death of her husband in a boating accident. Herre's mother remarried, however, and his stepfather encouraged him in education. This guiding light also passed away prematurely, while Herre was still in high school. Herre was then forced to earn a living rather than attend college after high school, and worked as a reporter from 1888-1900 and as a clerk at the Board of Education in Springfield, Illinois. He married Clara Mendosa in 1891. With a zealous thirst for learning, he continued his private studies and qualified as a high school teacher in 1893. As well as being a full-time teacher of history from that point, he continued his work for the local newspaper and studied courses at the University of Chicago. The family moved to Palo Alto, California in 1900 to ease Mrs. Herre's health problems, and Herre enrolled at Stanford University.

In 1903 Herre graduated from Stanford with a degree in botany. He went on to achieve his master's degree in 1905, focussing his research on lichens, but after this success was stricken with yet another family bereavement; his wife, Clara, died suddenly after contracting pneumonia. With five children to support and a teaching job at San Jose High School Herre nevertheless managed to continue research for his PhD, as well as study ichthyology, working under the direction of David Starr Jordan and C.H. Gilbert. After he married Lizzie Bailey in 1907, family life brightened and he had more time for his fieldwork around the Santa Cruz Peninsula. Saturdays were spent working on incoming collections of fish at Stanford. He was awarded his PhD in 1908, having submitted an excellent thesis on the lichens of Santa Cruz.

Herre continued to work in education for ten years, at first as Acting Professor of Biology at the University of Nevada and then back in California. He bought a farm at Bellingham in 1912 and was director of the School of Hygiene at Bellingham State Normal School by 1919. During this period he published 16 papers on lichens. A chance for adventure arose in 1920 when Herre was appointed the first Chief of Fisheries in the Philippine Bureau of Science, taking up his position in Manila that year. Over the next eight years he described many new species of fish, publishing much of his work in the Philippine Journal of Science, and toured the archipelago extensively, exploring mountain lakes and rivers, coral reefs, bays and channels, collecting both fish and lichens, and flowering plants incidentally. In 1929 he visited Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Celebes (Sulawesi). Herre described the smallest fish in the world, the Pandaca pygmea, in 1925, and later produced the comprehensive Checklist of Philippine Fishes in 1953. After a break in the U.S., during which he was appointed to a curatorial role at the Natural History Museum of Stanford, Herre returned to the Philippines in 1931 to undertake a survey of the country's fish resources, and again in 1933 during an expedition which also took him to China and the Malay Peninsula.

Herre remained a curator at Stanford until 1946, when he was made Curator of Ichthyological Collections Emeritus. Aged 78 he became a consultant and ichthyologist on the Philippine Fishery Program under the auspices of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, allowing him to return once more to the islands to make collections in 1947-1948. He then joined the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington as a consultant ichthyologist, continuing his work on Pacific Basin fish and also lichens. He returned to California a decade later, enjoying the last few years of his life close to his eldest daughter in Santa Cruz and devoting most of his time to lichens. His wife died shortly after the move, but Herre continued to lead an active life for another four years, at the age of 90 receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to make a six-month tour of herbaria, which he undertook in 1959. He even began planning a two-year study of Philippine fishes and had nearly completed a monograph on the genus Usnea by 1960. By the time of his death, he had completed more than 200 works on fish and 70 on lichens, the majority after he had turned 40 years of age.

Sources:
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:
http://www.nationaalherbarium.nl/FMCollectors/H/HerreAWCT.htm, accessed 22 September 2010
I.L. Wiggins, 1962, "Albert William Christian Theodore Herre (1868-1962)", The Bryologist, 65(4): 268–277.