Dad was an asthmatic, allergic young boy, in the days when the only treatment was breathing in steam by covering your head with a towel, curling your shoulders over the back of a chair and over the pot of steam. His mother was convinced that because of his poor health, his only career path would be as a writer, so she encouraged his writing. The Army was not impressed with Dad and labelled him “4F” because he was too thin, asthmatic, and had flat feet. He and his mother were determined he enter WWII and he was fed banana splits and other goodies to gain weight, to no avail.

Instead of serving in the war effort, Larry entered St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College), where he was one of only 4 men attending the 2-year college – all of them deemed unfit for service. Larry reminisced about those years he enjoyed at the junior college. Most extra-curricular groups wanted male participation, so he acted in plays and worked on the college paper, among other things.

At some point one of the three other male students asked Larry if he’d applied for the state’s college scholarship. He had not, as it was news to him. Upon testing for and receiving the scholarship, the junior college counselor recommended University of Michigan over Harvard for Biology. Although Dad later expressed regrets about that choice, it is clear that University of Michigan had excellent medical care and he received life-changing allergy shots from them. Even after he left for Rutgers, he was self-injecting shots mailed to him from University of Michigan!  Thank you, Ann Arbor!

A small Post-It note on refrigerator, upon which Dad wrote the amount of radiation in one banana.


At an academic dinner party, Dad says “Jesus H Christ.”  Asked “What does the H stand for, Larry?”  Without missing a beat, Dad replies  “H is for haploid.” (This was told to me, not witnessed.)

“Subvert the Dominant Paradigm” – a magnetic bumper sticker affixed to Larry’s refrigerator.

“Nothing is impossible to the determined will”—caption under Larry's photo in his Senior Year High School Yearbook, according to my mother.

“Annual Test of our Marriage” – this is what my father said about putting up the framework for the blueberry nets on their adjoining lot. Dad had cut and fit plastic tubes that rose above the 10 ft tall blueberry bushes, but he needed help fitting it together. I never witnessed this but I did enjoy my mother’s blueberry pies!

“In New England they call us “spiders” because we are all arms and legs,” explains Dad about our shared body types.  (Seeing his photo at 14 years old, in Gallery, it’s easy to see.)

A freak event occurred on July 7 and 8 of 1935 in Watkins Glen, NY that forever changed Larry and the Pomeroy family.  Heavy rains began one evening and continued into the next day. According to Larry, the CCC had been logging above the railroad trestle, which was above The Glen. The logs were driven by the excessive rain into the trestle, forming a temporary dam, which eventually burst, flooding the town, around 8 pm. At the entrance to The Glen stood the Pomeroy’s Rainbow Shop, their spring-summer-fall tourist shop. Larry’s Dad, Rupert ("Pom") and aunt Carol were at the shop and managed to wade home in sometimes waist deep water. The building, which his engineer father built, was flooded but held. They were lucky, as there was death and destruction.

Only a few years earlier his parents owned the successful Pomeroy’s Variety Store, the main general store for the area, but for some reason sold it.  Further, Pom had been persuaded by Doris to quit his engineering job at nearby Shephard Hoist and Crane Co. to help with the successful stores. Their only income, apparently, was the Rainbow Shop.

Tourist business was slow for the rest of the summer and into next year. As the local post card wholesaler, Pom had just paid for a large shipment of post cards of The Glen. They no longer sold. Although Doris and Pom had been successful business owners in the area for about 15 years – had a car, a boat, a 4-bedroom home, and wintered in Pass-a-Grille, FL -- they had no immediate way to pay rent or mortgages. FEMA didn’t exist and it apparently never occurred to them to talk to the local banks about a loan. Pom took my father, aged 10, with him when he handed over the house mortgage to its owner. From that point on, the family struggled to survive financially. Pom fixed up the attic of the Rainbow Shop so they had a place to live. It was the family trauma. It was certainly not something talked about much – until I had a chance to sit down with Dad in retirement.

Dad’s comment about this was that he had learned how to “make do” with little, which was a valuable lesson. His other general comment, was that his father should never have agreed to leave engineering school without his degree. Pom had been persuaded to take a job at Shephard Hoist and Crane, in Montour Falls, NY, in his last year at Worcester Polytechnic. It was WWI and they were desperate for engineers. His employers told him that he could always go back and finish his degree but they needed him now for the war effort. Before the flood destroyed their businesses, he’d left the company and didn’t have the degree to return to an engineering job. “Sometimes women have too much influence,” “always get the degree,” and “a PhD is like a union card” were Dad’s main comments.

In retirement, Dad told me he had a hard time deciding between Geology and Biology for his undergraduate major. After visiting The Glen in Watkins Glen, about 10 years ago, I now understand where his interest in geology came from!

From the time Larry was as tall as the ice cream buckets in his parents’ store, he was dipping ice cream, selling popcorn and postcards, and making change. This was the Rainbow Shop, in Watkins Glen, NY at the base of Lake Seneca and next to “The Glens,” a picturesque, rocky glen with a stream running through it. It was, and is, a tourist haven in the Finger Lakes region of New York. He and his parents returned to the Rainbow Shop most summers until WWII, when tourists stopped visiting. .

At that point,  his mother set up a year-round gift shop on St Pete Beach, selling souvenirs. As a child, I remember visiting the shop. It was filled with sea shells, fans, beach items, jewelry and an occasional fine piece. (His mother had a good eye for quality, but most tourists didn’t.)

Dad never made a comment about his mothers’ shop, but while traveling on back roads in Georgia and into the Smokies via Cherokee, we didn’t stop at any “tourist traps.” Anything selling souvenirs or other garden variety of “authentic” products was a tourist trap. Stuckey’s, common along Ga highways, was a tourist trap.A store with a wooden Indian in front of it was a tourist trap. The one exception was if the place had popcorn or ice cream! Then we might stop.

About 52 years ago I was just beginning my PhD program and had taken three courses that summer (biological oceanography, coastal geology, and marine algae).  I was in my advisor's office that fall discussing my program and what the subject of my research might be.  I hadn't thought very much about it and stammered around about doing something with the marsh plants, After listening to my rambling for awhile Frank Daiber took a puff on his cigar, blew a small smoke cloud above my head and said, "I wonder what the algae in the  marsh are doing?"  I hadn't really noticed them - mostly small green fussy filaments or brown scum on the mud.  After some digging in the library I found a paper Larry wrote on the topic. I was surprised these little things were about 25% as productive as the big grasses (rapid turnover rate).  It was the inspiration for my doctoral research.  

Three years later I found myself working at Sapelo and there he was.  I was fortunate to be part of a team he and Dick Wiegert formed to do a "comprehensive" marsh study.  One aspect was to look at the leaching of organic matter out of the leaves of living Spartina during high tides and its utilization by microbes in the water which Larry and I did with one of my technicians.  

Larry also gave me some sage advice on dealing with upper level administrators when I was playing an administrative role at UGAMI.

Working with Larry and his associates at Sapelo was a major factor in molding the research I did when I moved on to work with EPA in Oregon and the U of Delaware.

In preparation for an Ocean Sciences meeting, I was making airline reservations.  I got a great deal where, for reasons that I do not recall, a first class seat became available at the same price, or less, than that of the coach seats.  I grabbed it.  At the airport, I boarded the plane, took my seat in first class, and then watched as Larry, who entered the plane well behind me, gave me a wave as he walked past me to his seat in coach.

We all tried to give our best performance for Larry.  I was on a 3-week cruise on the RV Cape Hatteras, off Cape Fear, NC, with Larry, Bopi and Peter; part of the SPREX project (Chris Haney may have been there too).  I think we were on 6 hour shifts, with Bopi and me on one shift.  We would collect water from the rosette, filter water and fill sample bottles for 6 hours, then rest and eat for 6 hours.  At some point, I noticed that Bopi and Larry were working together when I entered the lab to start my shift.  After quite a few days, I noticed that my watch read an hour earlier than the ship’s clock; I had forgotten to adjust my watch for daylight savings time!  Larry had been staying on his shift an extra hour, waiting for me to show up.  I am still not sure why he did not mention it to me… was his anger slowly coming to a boil, did he enjoy working an extra hour in the lab, or was he just too polite and gentle to say anything?

What I learned from Larry in a nutshell

In 1993 Larry organized a couple of cruises in the Gulf of Mexico to do community respiration experiments and assessing limiting factors to respiration and bacterial growth. One station had to be in the Mississippi River Plume and he wanted to know exactly when we were hitting it. Since I was playing around with AD converters while trying to build a thermistor-based laboratory small-scale turbulence sensor, he asked me if we could rig up a system for continuous measurements of humics (gelbstoff) using a fluorometer. I took an old AD converter I think from a former student, either Peter Griffith or Sam Wainwright, fed in the analog output from a Turner fluorometer with proper lenses and sent the digital output to a Mac. A short BASIC program would save the data and do real-time plotting. This was what the MM read in Pomeroy et al. (1995). MEPS. 117: 259-268: "...Stn 14 was centered in the plume of the Mississippi River in darkness with the aid of continuous under-way recording of humate fluorescence using a Turner Designs fluorometer at an excitation wavelength of 360 nm and reading fluorescence at >510 nm. Fluorometer output was fed through an analog-digital converter to a computer programmed to compile and graphically present the fluorescence data in real time. This provided less ambiguous detection of the river plume than did chlorophyll or salinity."
I was (still am) so darn proud of it. Larry got the best out of me!

I was a Master's student of Larry's over 1983-1985. I had come over from the EPA Lab on College Station Road, where I had been working, to inquire about graduate work and, after a 15 minute conversation, he invited me to his lab. I was somewhat taken aback as he didn't have my school records or any evidence I was grad school material. Of course I soon learned he was always quick to make decisions.

In fact, he was hard to keep up with in more ways than one. He had an office in the Biological Sciences Department and also in the Institute of Ecology, which were (at that time) on central campus and connected by Brooks Drive. One usually walked up the sidewalk on Brooks Drive to get from one building to another but not Larry. He was a little man who wore these big white sneakers – he was a speedy walker - and he would cut through the buildings, parking lots and take all manner of shortcuts to get to either one of his classes or to one of his offices. It was hard to catch up with him with until, one day, I learned a secret. Larry had a weakness for ice cream. And the few times he walked along Brooks Drive was to make a beeline to the UGA Creamery to get an ice cream cone. It was usually in the afternoon so I would time my travels on campus so I could cross paths with him either zipping into the creamery or out with his cone. I learned later that Janet, his wife - who came from a dairy background, had courted him with ice cream.

I enjoyed my work with Larry but probably appreciated this experience more as time passed. He was judicious but pointed in his advice and always gave it when it was clearly needed. For example, he strongly encouraged me to go on for a PhD. I kept in touch with he and Janet after I left the Pomeroy lab and they were both very supportive when my father suddenly died a couple of years later. Like many others, my career path has crossed many fields and at each career move I would stop in to tell them what I was up to next. Larry once remarked I should write a book on my behind-the-scenes insights into the scientific enterprise.

Larry Pomeroy was a wonderful advisor and, later, friend. I’m grateful for the times I had with him.

Larry was helpful in providing details about his time at the Marine Institute I included in my book: 'Marsh Mud and Mummichogs: an Intimate Natural History of Coastal Georgia' (UGA Press, 2015). Here is an excerpt about the Pomeroys on Sapelo:

In 1954, as a young PhD, Larry Pomeroy was offered a position in the initial group of research staff stationed at the UGA Marine Institute. Pomeroy and his wife Janet arrived in the fall of that year at the newly established institute. In the main laboratory building, rats scampered in cow stalls still filled with hay. When R.J. Reynolds was in residence on the island, the scientists working at the Marine Institute would be invited up to the Big House on Friday evening for dinner. Pomeroy remembered lavish meals served with fine French wines. The Pomeroys must have gotten a kick from the Nouveau Riche decor of Reynold's mansion, including the basement game room decorated with images of pirates and having a bar that resembled a ship's bridge. There was a trick door in the bathroom of the game room.  When the outer door was opened, Reynold's guests, usually well lubricated from the game room bar, would surprise a flapper just getting up from the toilet. The Pomeroys would have gotten a laugh out of this.

Reynolds was so taken with Janet Pomeroy that he named the ferry used to transfer people and goods between Meridian Dock on the mainland and Marsh Landing Dock on the island after her. When Evelyn first came to Sapelo, the Janet was the boat that residents routinely took to the island, and on which our daily groceries and mail were delivered.

An excerpt from the Marsh Mud book on how Larry's 'Changing Paradigm' paper came to be published:

By the early 1970’s, Larry Pomeroy sensed that the prevailing concept that scientists had developed about marine food webs was not accurate. That established idea of food webs in the ocean was formalized in a slim 1974 book: The Structure of Marine Ecosystems by John Steele, a noted Scottish mathematical modeler interested in marine fisheries. Steele’s diagram of food webs relegated microbes to a ‘bacteria’ compartment in the benthos responsible for decomposing fecal material. His model had no formal role at all for bacteria or other heterotrophic microbes, like bacteria-eating flagellates, in the plankton. Steele concluded in his book that: ‘The phytoplankton of the open sea is eaten nearly as fast as it is produced, so that effectively all plant production goes through the herbivores.’ By herbivores’, Steele meant crustacean zooplankton that fed on algae.

Pomeroy knew that Steele’s model of the ocean’s food webs was incomplete. There was a lot of dead organic matter drifting about in seawater. Based on his and Johannes’ experiments, Pomeroy had evidence that decomposition of this organic matter by microbes caused most of the respiration in seawater. Pomeroy then had a profound insight. He combined the ecosystem theory promoted by Eugene and Howard Odum with the detritus-based food web concept developed by John Teal to form a new view of the role of microbes in the sea. Pomeroy extended Teal’s detrital food web of the salt marsh estuary to the ocean in general. In the revised model, bacteria decomposed dead organic matter originating from phytoplankton. Then bacteria and their protist predators reprocessed most of the nitrogen and phosphorus in the organic detritus back to chemical forms easily used by phytoplankton for further growth. Pomeroy’s idea directly challenged the model of marine food webs depicted in John Steele’s book.

Around this time, John Bardach, the editor of the journal BioScience, was looking for review papers with wide appeal to promote readership. He asked his friend, Bob Johannes, to suggest potential authors of such reviews. Johannes replied that his colleague Larry Pomeroy had new ideas about marine ecosystems that might be of interest. Pomeroy obliged the editor with a manuscript summarizing evidence supporting his concept that bacteria, along with their flagellate predators, were central to the functioning of marine ecosystems. Pomeroy later told me that his manuscript was sent out to two external referees for their opinion. One of the reviewers never responded, and the other one said the paper was nonsense and should be rejected. However, Bardach thought a controversial review was just the thing to excite interest in his journal, and published Pomeroy’s submission anyway, referees be damned.

By the end of the 1980’s Pomeroy’s 1974 paper in BioScience: ‘The Ocean’s Food Web: A Changing Paradigm’ was regarded as a pivotal description of the new ideas about how most
organic matter in planktonic food webs was processed by small planktonic organisms, mainly by marine bacteria and their protist grazers. Research on marine microbes was greatly stimulated by Pomeroy’s new concepts, which directly resulted from scientific investigations in Georgia marshes and estuaries.

It was 1985 and my first research cruise. I dragged myself around the ship, tipping over into seasickness at frequent intervals. But Larry worked. All the time. Totally concentrated. His shin was bleeding from an encounter with a door sill that he didn’t bother to stop to bandage! In 1998, we isolated a bacterium from Sapelo Island seawater, and Barny Whitman suggested we name it after Larry to acknowledge his groundbreaking insights into the marine microbial loop. Ruegeria pomeroyi DSS-3 turned out to be a workhorse for laboratory experimentation, diverse in its capabilities, and central to our improving understanding of microbial roles in marine biogeochemistry. A worthy namesake for Larry, I hope.

In 1975–1977, Evelyn, who was a new research scientist at the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, and Barry, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, collaborated on a project to evaluate whether salt marsh microbes could break down organic wastes and remove nitrogen via denitrification from secondarily treated sewage sludge applied to a Spartina marsh. We asked Larry Pomeroy, who was then directing a major project studying carbon flows in the salt marshes around Sapelo, if we could borrow his research van to deliver sludge from the Athens, GA, waste treatment plant to the island. (We may not have been entirely clear about what we were going to transport.) After loading up the sludge in trash barrels, we drove to the coast in time for the afternoon ferry to the island. It was a warm day, and with the van windows open we didn’t notice the winged creatures emerging from the barrels. But when we got to the coast and opened the van, a cloud of sludge flies exploded from the interior. We tried to shoo out as many flies as we could, without great success. After we returned the van, Pomeroy had it fumigated.

Larry was greatly influential in facilitating my work on using stable carbon isotopes of carbon to trace food webs in the salt marsh ecosystem around Sapelo Island.

I had gotten the bug about this rather new approach during my first year on the island in 1974, when Pat Parker, a geochemist from the University of Texas gave a talk in the theater of the Marine on use of stable carbon isotope analysis to look at what plants were eaten by what animals in a Gulf of Mexico coastal bay.

Larry kindly let me include a small amount of funding for stable carbon isotope analyses to his and Dick Wiegert's renewal of their NSF funded project focused on carbon flows in the salt marsh estuary. When I later got an NSF grant on my own to extend the stable isotope studies, Larry let me use space in his laboratory on the UGA campus to set up a system to prepare gaseous samples of carbon dioxide from organic detrital, plant and animal samples to have analyzed for stable carbon isotopes at a facility at the university.

The data I obtained on ratios of C-12 and C-13 in marsh plants and animals, along with other results of Pomeroy and Wiegert’s overall project, showed that marsh and estuarine food webs were much more complex than John Teal’s earlier work indicated, and were only partly based on cordgrass production. The carbon isotope ratios of the particulate material suspended in tidal creek water, which had been thought to mainly come from degraded Spartina leaves, instead closely matched the del 13-C value of phytoplankton. Only the very largest bits of plant material in the water had the same carbon isotope ‘fingerprint’ as Spartina plants. Marsh ecologists were relieved that most invertebrates living in the salt marsh: insects, snails, and fiddler crabs, did have about the same del 13-C value as Spartina; thus cordgrass was the ultimate food resource for these animals. So, they weren’t wrong about that part of the food web, at any rate. But the filter feeding mussels in the marsh, and oysters in the creeks, had isotope ratios more like those of phytoplankton. Animals in the estuary had a range of stable carbon isotope values, and appeared to be getting as much of their food from algae as from Spartina detritus.

An excerpt from the Marsh Mud book on the collaboration between Larry and Bob Johannes at the Marine Institute that set the stage for Larry's famous 'Changing Paradigm' paper:

Soon after he arrived at the Marine Institute, Pomeroy was joined by a post-doctoral colleague, Robert (Bob) Johannes. Both Pomeroy and Johannes were interested in elemental cycles in aquatic ecosystems. Johannes carried out experiments with bacteria-eating flagellates cultured from estuarine water. His data showed that the flagellates were capable of excretion of phosphate, a plant nutrient, at very high rates. When these excretion rates were based on units of biomass, that is, the amount of phosphorus released over time per unit of flagellate mass, the rate were found to be much greater than similar biomass-based rates of phosphate excretion determined by other scientists for animals in the zooplankton. The result was dramatic evidence that the smallest organisms in the plankton, notably single-celled microbes, had a much higher metabolic activity, or ‘rate of living’ than did larger sized plankton.

This finding led Pomeroy and Johannes to collaborate on experiments with plankton to demonstrate that the respiration rates scientists routinely measured in seawater were mainly due to activity of single-celled microbes rather than to that of planktonic animals. Respiration, or ‘breathing’ is carried out by all organisms in oxygen-rich environments, and can be quantified by the rate of disappearance of oxygen over time. Pomeroy and Johannes’ experiments consisted of filling a series of glass bottles with seawater, and stoppering the bottles so that they were air-tight to keep oxygen from leaking in or out. The bottles were incubated in the dark, to prevent any algae in the water from producing oxygen by photosynthesis. Then, the total amount of oxygen in individual bottles was measured using a chemical assay. The bottles were sampled, one by one, every few hours over a set time period, usually 12 to 24 hours, until all of the bottles had been assayed. The results were plotted on a graph of oxygen content in each bottle versus the elapsed time at which the bottle was sampled. Typically, they found a linear decrease in oxygen content in the bottles over time due to respiration of the organisms in the bottles. The decrease in oxygen was then used to calculate the rate of respiration in the seawater.

In their experiments, Pomeroy and Johannes compared rates of oxygen decrease in unfiltered seawater containing all sizes of organisms with rates of decrease in seawater passed through a No2 plankton net with a mesh size of 366 microns, a bit larger than the size of the mesh in a nylon stocking. The netting prevented any animals larger than that size, which ncluded most zooplankton, from going into the sample bottles. The colleagues discovered that the oxygen decrease, the respiration, in the bottles with the net-screened water was nearly identical to the respiration in seawater not passed hrough the net. From this result, it was clear that the organisms that passed through the plankton net were responsible for virtually all of the oxygen respired during the incubations. They concluded that, on a per-volume basis, the smaller organisms in the plankton, mainly bacteria and their flagellate predators, had a 10-fold greater rate of respiration compared to the excluded zooplankton.

           My academic introduction to coastal ecosystems was at Sapelo Island and the Georgia Marine Institute (Sapelo) by way of the fortuitous relationships with the University of Georgia faculty as a graduate student in the Ecology Program - then within the Department of Zoology. The Ecology Program later became today’s Institute of Ecology. Dirk Frankenberg, Bob Johannes, Gene Odum, Larry Pomeroy, Jim Schindler, and Bill Wiebe were not only scholarly scientific guides but also lively, kind, firm, and “to the point” about what a scientific career might bring to the life of those not yet steeped in the lore of science. I must have “underwhelmed” them many times. I have more patience with my students because of these UGA faculty because I have come to appreciate that they did the best they could with the meager resources this student brought to them.
            Larry was one of the brightest ecologists, and one of the most professional. Peruse his co-authors’ names and you will recognize them as accomplished scientists who would not long tolerate mis-adventures or light thinking. He maintained a sharp attention to scientific issues as evidenced by the dry academic metrics used to measure citations, or whatever. Larry’s presentations at professional meetings were always well-prepared, polite, and entirely credible, as well as embedded with a sense of quite enthusiasm. He didn’t arm-wave or entertain, but he did challenge you in his quiet way. There are few people like him who have are so capable of bringing out the intellectual side of science in a way that advances the science and promotes openness to the questions lying unanswered beneath the superficial surface of grantsmanship and generating a c.v. addition. His writing skills were exceptionally well honed, which also reflected Janet’s writing skills. In private conversations he was equally honest and helpful, while accommodating critical remarks from those of opposite views. He did not mince words, and was thoughtful and to the point. As someone about him; “When Larry talks, people listen.” As he said “it is better to hear it from your friends beforehand, than from the critics after it is published and cannot be changed.”
            His first Science paper was on phosphorus cycling, and there was another on the temperature limits of Arctic food webs. His work on phosphorus cycling turned the nutrient cycling perspectives on that element inside out - rather than being a slow turnover, it was incredibly fast, and mediated by the smallest, not the most conspicuous organisms. His paper in BioScience on the “microbial loop” is a classic. He was one of the first to promote and use high-quality modeling of food webs, brought to fruition one of the first syntheses of salt marsh ecosystems, and had a continuing interest in the connections between continental shelf waters and both estuary and deeper waters.
            He was Director of the Sapelo Island Marine Institute, after which its primary vessel at the time was named ‘Janet’ who was such a great partner. It was probably a trick to keep her at Sapelo longer. A determined field scientist, he once putt-putted his outboard back to the laboratory in Chesapeake Bay with the motor in reverse, taking several hours to return, but without inconveniencing anyone by asking for assistance. He taught students by example that it was often not necessary to go much further than the hardware store for supplies or your backyard to learn something about the fundamentals of how ecosystems ‘work’ to cycle nutrients. His few expensive toys were the means to get an answer, and were not the focus of his attention, for Larry believed in a data-rich and thoughtful analysis. He was un-constrained by what was ‘supposed’ to be the understanding of things, especially if it was different from what his experience was. And if he saw what was really going on -- as he did with the role of microbes earlier than almost everyone -- he would not give up.
            He had a sharp and wry sense of humor and potent powers of observations that, thankfully, kept him out of the Dean’s office, despite repeated attempts to get him there for a term or two. One time he succinctly and humorously stopped the audience of microbial ecologists from going into a cul d’sac of logical superfluousness by pointing out that their attention was drifting into questions about the microbes in the ungulate’s stomach, rather why the cow was in the pasture in the first place.
            Larry introduced graduate students to Liebig's Law of the Minimum -- what it was, might be, and wasn’t. Liebig’s Law stated that plant yield was proportional to the limiting nutrient supply. As the limiting nutrient was supplied, another nutrient became limiting, and so forth. This law was then widely credited to the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), who also challenged the prevailing assumption that soil humus was the source of all nutrients. But it was Carl Sprengel (1787-1859) who is now considered to have formulated the Law of the Minimum, and for disproving the humus theory of soil fertility. Liebig, it seems, was not at all shy about taking credit for the work of other’s, whether by failing to offer credit or by force of his strong personality. That aspect of Liebig’s persona was not something a graduate student wanted to hear. However, Larry then balanced that negativity with the observation that Liebig put his students in the laboratory to do their own work and to generate their own observations and data. Liebig’s students listened to the Herr Professor in lectures and made their own observations in the laboratory. They became more engaged in their profession through the laboratory experience and were better professionals because of it. Larry made these points about professionalism, gaming the system, personal responsibility, and teaching efficacy in a few brief remarks about someone’s work of 100+ years earlier. It was an effective discussion by a warm human being trying to make the world a better place.

I was one of his early graduate students and pursued my research on the fouling organisms on oyster shells and plastic surfaces at the University of Georgia Marine Institute at Sapelo Island (studying community respiration as they developed seasonally).  Unfortunately my research we terminated pre-maturely when my research raft was moved from a dock to accommodate a VIP visit to Sapelo Island.  The raft was moved to nearby piling and got hung up when the tide went out which killed most of the fouling organisms.  This was a common practice in oyster reef aquaculture to kill fouling organisms and allow the oysters to grow more quickly to maturity.  In my case the piling
was thicker in the middle than at the top, so that when the tide went out my rafts hung up on a cold day for an extended period when I was off the island shopping for groceries.  Larry stood by me and I completed my dissertation in 1971 with the data that I had accumulated.

In 1971 I participated in a 57 day research cruise in the Antarctic Ocean studying the community metabolism of the microbial food web (one of Larry's key scientific findings). The aim of this cruise was the study the food chain in the southern ocean, but the Eltanin's computer system was knocked out in a storm with 15-20 foot waves.  Myself and a pharmacy graduate student continued with our research which involved concentrating the micro plankton  and measuring their oxygen consumption with oxygen electrodes (most of the
community respiration occurs in the planktonic component of the marine food chain).  Larry and I wrote this research up for a journal publication for a group scientific study of the Antarctic food web, but the papers from other scientists
were not accepted for publication (so we had to abandon publication).

On our plane trip back from Christchurch New Zealand  on a US Naval air prop plane, we encountered mechanical problems with the landing gear and had stops in American Samoa; Hawaii; and Oakland, Ca. (the plane had been brought out of moth balls for the flight back to the US).  I contacted Larry after the problems in Oakland and he funded a commercial flight from San Francisco back to Atlanta (using up the remains of the grant money).  I also got to see parts of southwestern Australia and the southern island of New Zealand via rental cars with my ship room mates, so this was a unique opportunity.  Larry had been scheduled to go on this trip, but took up an offer to participate in a coral reef research project on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean  (showing his scientific versatility).

Following graduation from the University of Georgia with a degree in Zoology
(this was before the Ecology Institute became a fixture at UGA), I worked in academia; environmental consulting and the federal government (NASA and NOAA).  During my final years at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Ma., I work on the EMaX (Energy Modeling and Analysis Exercise) which developed a carbon budget for the Northeast Continental Shelf Ecosystem (mouth of Chesapeake Bay to Maine).  It turns out that we had more carbon produced at the base of the food chain than yield of fish & shellfish; marine mammals; sea turtles and seabirds at the top (which are managed by NOAA Fisheries). We added the microbial food web to the base of the food chain which increased community respiration and balanced our
carbon budget.  

Thus the work that Larry Pomeroy  and other biological oceanographers did in the late 1960's/1970's became part of fisheries science
in the 2000's where it partly explains the effect of climate change in the Gulf of Maine in reducing the yield on Living Marine/Protected/Natural Trust Resources from bottom up forcing in the plankton to top down changes in predation and competition as marine biota change their locations in space and time.  Larry was quite surprised when I informed about the outcome of the EMaX project carbon budget, since fisheries research was based upon the
grazing food chain (diatoms --> large zooplankton --> forage species --> LMRs; PRs and NTRs) conceptual model. I often utilize the EMaX project as a case study when I submit comments as a grassroots environmental activist living on Cape Cod on ocean climate disruption challenges locally. I support an adaptive, ecosystems-based approach to fisheries management.