Alan J. Southward

Alan James Southward (17 April 1928 – 27 October 2007) was a British marine biologist who studied marine ecology, barnacles, tube worms, and deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Southward was born and raised in Liverpool, England. He studied at the University of Liverpool. His PhD, obtained for that school in 1951, was on the ecology of the foreshore of the Isle of Man. Southward was a "world expert on the taxonomy of barnacles" and wrote two books on them, but was also interested in the ecology of hydrothermal vents, which he studied with his wife, Eve Southward. He retired in 1987 but continued to work and publish in the field of marine biology until his death in 2007.

Life and education Southward was born on 17 April 1928 in Liverpool, England. His father worked for Cunard engineering as a shipfitter. As a teenager, Southward attended Liverpool Collegiate School. A meningitis infection around that timeEfn|Sources differ on whether he was 14 His thesis, the result of three years of field work, was titled On the Ecology of the Foreshore of the South of the Isle of Man. Chthamalus southwardorum, a barnacle discovered in 2007 and named in Southward's honour "for his extensive contribution to the knowledge of the chthamalids" While working on the Isle of Man, he met Eve Judges and later married her. She was an expert on marine worms and life around hydrothermal vents, and collaborated with him on his work over the next decades. Eve survived him, and died of stroke in 2023, at the age of 92. Alan Southward was quite deaf and learned to lip-read when he was young; Later, in the 1970s, he and his wife worked on the biota of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and the role of chemosynthetic bacteria in those communities.

Publications Southward contributed some 220 papers over his lifetime, as well as two books:

Life on the Seashore (1967) Barnacle Biology (1987) British Barnacles (2008)

British Barnacles was completed a month before he died and published by the Linnean Society.