Daphne Gail Fautin

Daphne Gail Fautin (25 May 1946 – 12 March 2021) was an American professor of invertebrate zoology at the University of Kansas, specializing in sea anemones and symbiosis. She is world-renowned for her extensive work studying and classifying sea anemones and related species.

Education Fautin received her B.S. in biology (magna cum laude) in 1966 from Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin (where she taught as a visiting professor in the mid-1980s), and her Ph.D. in zoology in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. dissertation was "Natural History of the Sea Anemone Epiactis prolifera Verrill, 1869, with Special Reference to Its Reproductive Biology."

Career Fautin published numerous scientific articles and texts—including co-authoring Encyclopædia Britannica's entry on cnidarians—and her publications have been widely cited by other researchers in the field.

In her career, Fautin personally identified at least 19 new species. This database was later absorbed into Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) and World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). Fautin was a founding member of OBIS's first international committee. Furthermore, she served as the vice-chair of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) science committee.

Fautin served as vice president and commissioner of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, overseeing the naming of new species. She served as the editor of the scientific journal Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics (1992-2001).

Although she lived and worked in landlocked Lawrence, Kansas, she felt that working from dry land was not a serious impediment, stating that "you only need to be near an airport, not the ocean."

Eponym An example of Relicanthus daphneae, named after FautinA large sea anemone-like cnidarian species, Relicanthus daphneae, was named in Fautin's honor. Originally called Boloceroides daphneae, it was renamed to Relicanthus daphneae after it was discovered (using DNA-based identification techniques) to belong to a previously unknown cnidarian order.

The Tiger anenome, Macrodactyla fautinae, was also named in Fautin's honor, as it was a species she studied, but was unable to identify.