Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman

Who was Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman?

Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman was a Canadian academic, oceanographer, and fisheries biologist. He is best known for his research on Atlantic salmon and inventing the fast freezing of fish fillets in 1929.

Born in Tintern, Ontario, the son of Lution Erotas Huntsman and Elizabeth Gowanlock Huntsman, Huntsman attended St. Catharines Collegiate Institute before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1905. He then studied medicine receiving his Bachelor of Medicine degree in 1907. He would not practice medicine and received an honorary M.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 1933.

In 1907, he joined the Department of Zoology of the University of Toronto as a lecturer. In 1917, he was appointed an associate lecturer and was appointed a professor of marine zoology in 1927. He retired in 1954.

In 1911, he was appointed Curator at St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick, and became its permanent curator in 1915, following his intensive participation in the Canadian Fisheries Expedition of 1914-15. For this expedition, the Canadian government hired Johan Hjort, the great Norwegian fisheries biologist who was at that time the leading scientist in the field, to come to Canada and investigate the conditions of the herring in the offshore waters. Hjort introduced to Canada the latest developments in the nascent science of fisheries biology and in Scandinavian dynamic oceanography, both of which influenced Huntsman profoundly, changing his research focus from the study of ascidian taxonomy and evolutionary questions to problems of fisheries science. Huntsman was Director of the St. Andrews Biological Station from 1919 to 1934, while keeping his post at the University of Toronto. This enabled him to shape the Canadian fisheries science agenda in that era, promoting the professionalization of the science while at the same time training almost an entire generation of fisheries scientists at the University of Toronto.