Ransom A. Myers

Who was Ransom A. Myers?

Ransom Aldrich "Ram" Myers, Jr. was a world-renowned marine biologist and conservationist.

He was the son of cotton planter, Ransom Aldrich Myers, Sr. and Fay A. Mitchell Myers. At age 16, in 1968, Myers won an international science fair for building an "X-ray crystallograph" which measured the symmetry of atoms.

Myers graduated with a B.Sc. in physics from Rice University in 1974 followed by an M.Sc. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in biology from Dalhousie University. Before joining the faculty of Dalhousie University in 1997 as the first Killam Chair in Ocean Studies, he was a research scientist at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Myers was best known for his passionate warnings on the worldwide overfishing of the fish stocks in the oceans, in particular, the Atlantic cod and Southern bluefin tuna. As a member of the IUCN shark specialist group, he collected data about the decline of shark populations and directed the focus of the media to threatened shark species.