Marian H. Pettibone 1908 – 2003
The doyenne of polychaete studies died 17 December 2003; she was 95 years old
and had for the last few years lived in a retirement home in her home-town,
Tacoma, Washington.
Marian took emeritus-status in 1978, but that certainly did not slow her down
at all: All of the papers on the highly modified polynoids associated with
the various forms of vents were published well after she retired and several
very important revisions of genera and subfamilies were also issued. She kept
up not only her correspondence with scientists the world over, but also
maintained her enormous file of cutouts. For the uninitiated, these are Xerox-
copies (and originals when possible) of everything she could find on every
species of polychaete, organized by family and alphabetically by genus and
species. This developed into an enormously important resource for the
community at large, and she shared her information happily while she was still
active; even now, for any person interested in polychaetes, these files can be
made available for study.
Marian’s research was focused on two main issues: She was by far the all-
time leading expert on scale worms (superfamily Aphroditacea if you will); her
studies of acoetids, sigalionids, pholoids, polynoids and aphroditids will
remain important for all future. In addition she was for a long time busily
revising the total polychaete fauna of the New England region and issued one
authoritative volume of what would probably have been a two volume exercise if
she had completed the whole study. She got as far as the spionids and
recognized that revisions needed to clarify that family and several of the
other large “sedentary” families simply would take more than she had of time
and interest. So, after finishing off several minor reviews, she returned, I
believe happily and with a sense of relief, to her scale worms with renewed
enthusiasm: Her studies from the 1980’s of the completely unexpected fauna of
scale worms associated with the hot vents and cold seeps expanded the
morphological scope of the group and demonstrated that even within the rather
rigid pattern of a polynoid, the flexibility in structure and growth was
remarkable.
Marian spent an enormous amount of time on pre-submission manuscripts sent to
her by polychaetologists from all over the world. If she felt she needed to,
she would drag out specimens, and even ask to borrow the specimens the author
had used, if there was something she did not grasp or she did not believe was
correct. Many of us have gotten back manuscripts that she had “bled” all over
with a red pencil in a very difficult-to-read scrawl of a handwriting. It was
always worthwhile working ones way through the wilderness: She had a grasp of
the literature and of the niceties of systematic zoology as few others.
Marian was definitely an independent person, at a time when being independent
was frowned upon by all and sundry. Most of us have heard the story of how
she decided while standing in line for working for the war effort (WWII mind
you) she could hear how the men standing in the line next were going to get
paid a lot more than she was, standing in line to become a typist. She
switched lines and became a spot-welder on the victory ships being produced at
the shipyards in Tacoma. It did not take her long to become a quality
inspector for spot-welding at the shipyard. The episode did not last long
actually; she had graduated from Linfield College and started graduate school
at University of Washington just a few years later. She came to the
Smithsonian Institution in the early 1960’s, first on fellowships, but she was
later hired as the first polychaete curator in the history of the Institution.
She was here when the collection moved from the center building out to the
west wing where it is now and got the collection moved and organized with
marvelous efficiency. One of her conditions when she started work here was
that she would not have to be bothered with administration and could do what
she wanted for the rest of her career and that is exactly what she did.
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