His professional activities, among many, included the teaching of summer courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts (1966-1968), acting as symposium convenor for "The Panamic Biota: Some Observations Prior to a Sea Level Canal" (1971-1972), acting as project supervisor for a contract with the Bureau of Land Management/Mineral Management Service, Department of Interior, "Archival of Voucher and Other Specimens from BLM/MMS Outer Continental Shelf Programs" (1979-1989), and acting as symposium convenor for "The Hydrothermal Vents of the Eastern Pacific: An Overview" (1983-1985).
During the 1970s, he was an active participant in the debate on how a sea-level canal would affect the shallow-water faunal assemblages of Panama. He offered testimony to several Congressional committees, especially noting the paucity of knowledge of the shallow-water faunal assemblages on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama. To address this concern, he obtained funding, organized and led several expeditions to Panama. The material collected on these expeditions remains as the definitive baseline data set of the shallow-water marine invertebrates of Panama.
As Curator at the NMNH, he actively pursued all opportunities to add to the collections of the Museum. In addition to Panama, he traveled to Cuba, Bermuda and a variety of other Caribbean localities to collect benthic invertebrates, bringing back large numbers of specimens to add to the collections of the NMNH. His direction of the project with the Bureau of Land Management/Mineral Management Service resulted in the addition of hundreds of thousands of lots of benthic marine invertebrates to the Museum's collections, assuring that future generations of scientists will have specimens to assist in the evaluation of marine biodiversity in regions of the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Beginning in 1979, and lasting until his retirement, he turned his attentions to a small group of benthic marine worms (vestimentiferans) that live in association with deep-sea hydrothermal vents and deep-sea hydrocarbon seep ecosystems. Through personal collecting and by encouraging the donation of specimens from other scientists, he assembled the largest and most diverse collection of vestimentiferan worms and other vent and seep related species in any museum in the world.
His research interests varied throughout his distinguished career, but regardless of the topic he remained committed to the ideal of the "dissemination of knowledge." To that end, he published in excess of 85 papers and abstracts in books and professionally refereed journals. These contributions were broad ranging in their coverage, including studies of biodiversity, studies of various physical parameters of the oceans and their effects on the organisms living there, experiments utilizing electrophoresis as a methodology to help determine evolutionary relationships of a variety of marine invertebrate groups, taxonomy of several marine invertebrate groups (polychaetous annelids, crustaceans and vestimentiferans), and finally, investigations using light and electron microscopes to elucidate the morphology of marine invertebrates. The significance of his published studies can be further appreciated by the fact that authors of other professional papers cited results and/or insights from his investigations in excess of 500 times by 1989.
Immediately prior to his death, he was actively involved in the description of a new species of vestimentiferan recently discovered in a hydrocarbon seep community in the Gulf of Mexico. His unique insights on this new vestimentiferan will be published in the near future. His legacy, however, includes not only this work and his many published studies but also the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students he helped to train and the worldwide community of colleagues whose work was enriched through interactions with him throughout his career."
Stephen L. Gardiner
Department of Biology
Bryn Mawr College
Date: Wed, 13 Mar
96 18:08:05 AEST " It is with a lot of sadness that I am writing this note -
Meredith had been ill for some time with cancer and recently died. Those of you who visited the
Worm Section at The Smithsonian will remember his cheerful face and a willingness to help and
discuss taxonomic problems and help clarify morphological structures. On my first visit I
was given a detailed picture of how he was revising the Family Magelonidae and how he was
gradually finding valid characters to separate this nasty group - to my eyes all of which looked
the same. He agreed to look at some Australian material and we got a name. I wonder what ever
happened to that matrix on the wall? However perhaps it was on my next visit when some amazing
animals arrived and we spent all day looking at these animals- subsequently to be called
Riftia -- these became his consuming passion and over the next few years he undertook a
very detailed study of the morphology of the group, and he never did get back to those
Magelonids. Sometimes working with Steve Gardner he basically sectioned the animal and was
able to reconstruct amazing 3D reconstructions which enabled them to begin to understand the
morphology, and which greatly facilitated all the other studies which began to occur on vent
faunas . While some of us disagree with his suggested phylogeny of the group -- and their
status -- without Meredith's detailed studies their true position could only have been guessed
at. With Meredith's passing we have lost a truly remarkable invertebrate biologist and
morphologist -- and I have lost a friend as have many of you." Pat Hutchings From: Cutlereb@aol.com " Greetings, For those of you who may wish to do so he requested that an appropriate memorial
would be to send a gift the the San Juan County Library c/o his wife: Mrs Gerry Jones, 2283
Mitchell Bay Rd., Friday Harbor, WA 98250. They provided him with taped books in the later stages
of his illness." Ed Cutler
From: PatH
To: annelida@net.bio.net
Subject: Meredith Jones
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 19:03:51 -0500
To:
ANNELIDA@net.bio.net
Subject: Meredith Jones
As a follow-up to Pat
H's earlier note on Meredith's passing - I too shall miss him. As the only other American who has
described a species of Pogonophora (whatever their status might be - yet to be decided?) Meredith
has been a mentor and friend for over 30 years. His balance and sense of self (i.e. not inflated)
made him an easy person to be with and learn from - he was special as a person and as a
biologist.
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