John Langdon Brooks

John Langdon Brooks (1920-2000) was an American evolutionary biologist, ecologist and limnologist.

Brooks was born in 1920, probably in Hamden, Connecticut, his father was John Alexander Brooks and his mother was Grace Evelyn Langdon, he had a sister Helen and a brother Richard.

Brooks attended Yale University, where he studied under the guidance of G. Evelyn Hutchinson. He remained at Yale, at the Osborn Zoological Laboratory, until 1969 where he worked on the ecology and evolution of freshwater biota. During this period he co-authored an article with Stanley Dodson entitled Predation, Body Size and Composition of Plankton which was published in Science in October 1965. This article discussed the effect of an introduced predator, the alewife, on the planktonic fauna of lakes in New England and has been widely cited. He was the first editor of the journal Systematic Zoology, his tenure lasting from 1952 to 1957.

Brooks joined the National Science Foundation in 1969 and in 1981 he became Director of the Division of Environmental Biology with responsibility for the programs of the Foundation on Ecology, Population Biology and Physiological Ecology, Ecosystem Studies, Systematic Biology, and Biological Research Resources. Brooks retired from the NSF in June 1989.

Selected bibliography The following is a selected bibliography of works authored or co-authored by Brooks:

1946 Cyclomorphosis in Daphnia: I. An Analysis of D. retrocurva and D. galeata Ecological Monographs 16 (4) 409-447 1950 Speciation in Ancient Lakes, The Quarterly Review of Biology 25 (1) 30-60 1950 Review: Recent Advances in Limnology Ecology Vol. 31 (4) 659-660 1957 The Systematics of North American Daphnia Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Yale University 1963 Predation, Body Size and Composition of Plankton with Stanley Dodson Science 150:28-35 1972 Extinction and the origin of organic diversity New Haven : Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science 1984 Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Evolution Columbia University Press, New York,

Legacy A haplochromine cichlid endemic to Lake Malawi was named Otopharynx brooksi in his honor in 1989 by M.K. Oliver.