Discover
On July 6, 1901, Natalie Karsakoff took a break from her busy schedule to jot down a letter to her mentor, the French botanist Édouard Bornet. Hoping he would be part of her on the northwest coast of France, she couldn’t assist however boast a bit about the place she was staying: the house of her good pal Anna Vickers.
Their lodging had all the pieces a summer season vacationer wanted, she wrote: “an impressive laboratory, well-lit, clear,” with “a range to warmth ones toes,” “blinds to sift the sunshine,” and, after all, “tiled flooring that might deal with any liquid.” Proper outdoors was the primary attraction: a shore populated with what would finally show to be a whole bunch of species of algae, swaying underwater and ready to be discovered.
Karsakoff and Vickers, whose story is detailed in an enchanting paper by science historian Emily S. Hutcheson, had been devoted algologists. For 12 summers, from 1889 to 1901, they lived collectively at Vickers’ home in Roscoff, France, “revel[ing] amongst Chylocladias, Myrrotrichias, Callophyllis, Callithamnions, and Polysiphonias,” as Karsakoff wrote in one other letter. They pushed the unlikely custom of feminine seaweed specialists to new ranges. They usually did all this inside a stone’s skip of the Station Biologique De Roscoff, a analysis institute the place different marine fanatics, principally males, pursued related pursuits in very alternative ways.
The Seaweed Craze
Within the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fervor for pure historical past swept Europe. In Victorian England particularly, this common enthusiasm crested into fads, usually centered round gathering and arranging specimens, and enabled by adjustments in infrastructure and expertise and growing democratization of science. As historian Stephen Hunt instructed Atlas Obscura, working-class individuals and aristocrats alike used their increasing leisure time to hop trains out to the seashore or countryside, collect specimens, and look at them underneath more and more reasonably priced microscopes or current them on the subsequent assembly of their native pure historical past membership.
Their lodging had all the pieces a summer season vacationer wanted: an impressive laboratory …
One in all these developments was the “seaweed craze.” In line with the historian David Elliston Allen, European algae mania started in London within the 1750s when a service provider and botanist named John Ellis created a whimsical miniature seascape out of frondy specimens that ended up impressing the Princess Dowager of Wales. Inside a century, the UK’s shorelines had been thronged with excited splashers wielding, within the phrases of famed Nineteenth-century seaweeder and writer Margaret Gatty, “a basket, a bottle, a stick, [and] a powerful pair of trainers.”
Girls had been in on it from the start. (Ellis obtained his specimens from his sister in Dublin—behind each nice man is a girl sending him seaweed within the mail.) However over time, sea crops emerged as a novel locus of alternative for feminine pure historians, who had been barred from main scientific societies and discouraged from supposedly unseemly pursuits like chasing animals and dissecting the intercourse organs of land crops. Plus, many had been on the shore already, trying to revive their well being by way of sand promenades and respiration salty air.
Girls who caught the seaweeding bug tried to unfold the phrase to different ladies. Gatty—who picked it up in East Sussex, the place she was therapeutic after her seventh childbirth—used a lot of the introduction of her 1872 guide British Sea Weeds to talk to what she calls her “sisterhood,” hoping to deliver them out to the tideline and provides them the chance to see and really feel what she had. She supplied style recommendation (“let woollen be within the ascendant as a lot as potential; and let the petticoats by no means come under the ankle”) and, maybe extra importantly, a pep speak. “You might be in the best costume on the proper place,” she wrote, “… free, daring, joyous, monarch of all you survey, untrammelled, comfortable, at house! At house, although amongst all method of unusual, strange creatures, flung at your toes each minute by the short succeeding waves.”
Quickly, a type of subculture sprouted. Some ladies collected with their husbands (one male naturalist wrote about how his spouse used a “bigger muff than the current style would commend” to smuggle their seaweeding gear offshore). Others collaborated with male scientists, who folded their samples into revealed work. Nonetheless others targeted on the creation of public-facing pure historical past works, or of unimaginable aesthetic objects—together with the primary guide ever illustrated with photographic photographs, Anna Atkins’s 1843 Pictures of British Algae, and vivid scrapbook albums of actual specimens which are nonetheless collected and utilized in scientific analysis in the present day.
The Central Bureau
Throughout the channel in Roscoff, and a long time after a few of their predecessors, Karsakoff and Vickers waded into algology from a barely completely different place. Karsakoff, who was born in Russia and educated in France, had formal scientific coaching from the Sorbonne and expertise working at Moscow State College. Though Vickers didn’t have this coaching, household wealth had afforded her different alternatives—to “examine botany by way of gathering” whereas touring, and to purchase an oceanfront home in Roscoff and outfit it with lab area and provides, Hutcheson writes. They’d the assist of male mentors like Bornet and fewer angst about, as Karsakoff put it, “[running] concerning the seaside and among the many rocks dressed as a man.” Neither was married.
In addition they had completely different objectives for his or her work than a number of the ladies who got here earlier than. Fairly than making scrapbooks or public-facing guides, the 2 spent their summers pursuing scientific papers and compiling a florule: a Who’s Who of seaweeds and different algae rising on this hyperdiverse slice of shoreline.
However as Hutcheson argues in her account, these scientifically bold ladies stored one thing in widespread with Gatty’s seaweed sisterhood. They thrived in, and wanted, group. When Karsakoff first got here to Roscoff in 1889, she was intrigued by the presence of the Station Biologique, however intimidated by its formality. Even when she had wished to check or work there, it will have been tough. Lodging was solely supplied to males.
They “interpreted the pure world as a spot of mutual assist.”
Karsakoff and Vickers met throughout her preliminary go to, and bonded over their shared love of algae. That summer season, Karsakoff began working with Vickers and staying in her house. A long time earlier than Virginia Woolf revealed “A Room of One’s Personal,” Vickers gave Karsakoff “not solely a stunning bed room however a cupboard de travail or laboratory all to your self,” Karsakoff wrote.
Each additionally obtained one thing extra: “the delight of being mad as a pack of March hares” whereas combing the seaside, wrote Karsakoff, with “devoted mates to assist in the spreading and drying in order to allow you to take a look at the microscope and luxuriate in your self.” Over the course of their dozen summers, the 2 invited different ladies with related pursuits to hitch them (generally together with their moms, who served as chaperones).
Throughout the remainder of the yr, in the event that they traveled to different shores, they tried to rearrange meetups: All the things at all times went higher with “two individuals mad collectively over the dredging, drying, and so forth.” as Karsakoff wrote to a different algal fanatic in 1897, trying to persuade her to hitch Vickers in Naples. Finally, the pair’s dedication to increase these networks made Karsakoff really feel as if she, herself, was “progressively changing into a central bureau in female algology.”
Symbiosis
This methodology of working gave Vickers and Karsakoff a special view of their material—from the seaweeding ladies who got here earlier than, but additionally from the principally male scientists working close by on the Station Biologique, Hutcheson notes. Whereas the station targeted on lab work and particular person specimens, the ladies’s florule sought to put each species correctly in its atmosphere and to grasp the place completely different marine crops grew and thrived, whether or not atop uncovered rocks or deep beneath the waves.
Though noting which species might be discovered the place had at all times been essential to collectors, the concept this had organic significance was simply starting to achieve steam. And whereas that period’s mainstream theories targeted on violence and competitors between species, Karsakoff and Vickers “interpreted the pure world as a spot of mutual assist,” Hutcheson writes, just like the working and dwelling areas that they had constructed.
In line with Hutcheson that is most noticeable in a paper Karsakoff revealed in 1892, describing the lives of small, fluffy brown algae within the genus Myriotrichia. Members of Myriotrichia develop epiphytically, perched on prime of different underwater crops. On the time, shut associations between species had been usually seen as rivalrous, if not outright parasitic. However Karsakoff describes the algae as innocent tufts, which merely “take their share of warmth and daylight” with out harming their hosts—simply as she herself loved the warmth of Vickers’ foot range, and the daylight filtering by way of the laboratory blinds. Right this moment, mutualistic relationships just like the one Karsakoff acknowledged are seen as pillars of the ecosystems they’re a part of.
Regardless of years of labor, Vickers and Karsakoff had been by no means capable of publish their florule themselves. Vickers died unexpectedly in 1906, when she was 54, forsaking collections from a visit to Barbados, which different feminine collaborators finally revealed. In 1954, her and Karsakoff’s Roscoff analysis was swept into a bigger species stock completed by the Station Biologique, the place a few of their specimens nonetheless reside. Others are in Harvard College’s Farlow Herbarium.
However maybe the very best illustration of their working relationship doesn’t come from Roscoff in any respect. In 1896, Karsakoff described and named a brand new genus of algae that Vickers had discovered within the Canary Islands, in a paper she revealed in Annales des Sciences Naturelles. Within the paper’s accompanying illustration, the algae, branched and overlapping and filamentous, stretches like an umbrella over Karsakoff’s title and the title she gave the species: Vickersia canariensis. 
Lead picture: Biodiversity Heritage Library
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