w 1951 WILLIAM H. PROCTER (1872-1951) Relatively unknown today by Mount Desert Island residents and visitors, William Procter played a very significant role in contributing to the scientific knowledge about what is today Acadia National Park. An heir of one of the founders of the Procter and Gamble Company, he dedicated the later part of his life to the study of insects on Mount Desert Island. Over the course of 27 years, starting in 1918, Dr. Procter spent a majority of his time combing the island for insects. He ultimately published 7 scientific volumes summarizing his collecting efforts; no fewer than 439 families, 2,660 genera, and 6,578 species and subspecies were documented! His field notes and ~ 20,000 pinned and wet specimens are now permanent- ly preserved at the William Otis Sawtelle Collections and Research Center at Acadia National Park. Since its arrival in 2000, scientists from as far away as Russia have come to use the collection for research purposes (it was previously housed at the University of Massachusetts). Dr. Procter's collection represents an incredibly rich and unique information base that is unequaled at most other national parks. Because of his dedicated studies, scientists today can now make comparisons about the past and present species diversity and distribution in order to learn about how changes in climate, land use, and the 1947 Mount Desert Island fire affected the island's fauna. Dr. Procter played a role in helping to establish the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL), served on an advisory board at the Columbia University Zoology Department, was a board member of the Wistar Institute and a Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History. He contributed financially to many scientific organizations, including the Entomology Society of America, Society of Sigma Xi, and the Research Society of America. In 1950, Sigma Xi established the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement; Stephen Jay Gould, Jane Goodall, and E.O. Wilson are several of the recent winners. There are many people who contributed time, money, and energy to help protect Acadia National Park. Dr. William Procter was a distinguished natural scientist who worked tirelessly to catalog some of the Park's fauna well before the National Park Service took an interest in natural resource management. Now thanks to his efforts, park managers and the scientific community have vital information to help characterize and assess the health and condition of Acadia National Park's ecosystems. David Manski Chief, Division of Resource Management Acadia National Park 53 / (Maine News) MaineCoastNOW.com - Your daily source for local news, sports, enterta Page 1 of 4 Maine NOW com Your daily source for local news, sports and entertainment Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Local News Her KNOWLES Over One Hundred Years of Professional GET CAUGHT UP WITH THE Real Estate Service Home Arts & Entertainment Search News Archives on MDI e-Editions LECTION ENCORE Classified & Auto Real Estate Bar Harbor Times > Local News Maine Connection Classified AnswerTips" Place An Ad NOW! Maine Connection Auto Insect insight Top Advertisers Auto Ads Employment Ads By Laurie Schreiber Real Estate & Rentals Ads (Created: Saturday, December 1. 2007 12:06 PM EST) More Local News Advertisers/Services FIND IT NOW Directory TT I Text Size I Comment Print E-mail Restaurant Menus Letter to the Out of State & NOT TTr. Advertising Circulars Editor I digg it getting your paper News on time? Local News BAR HARBOR - Nearly a century ago, William Procter was on a boat, hauling sign up for Politics up marine invertebrates from the bottom of Frenchman and Blue Hill bays. The Bar barbor Times Community e-Edition! Cops & Courts A few years later, he Letters & Editorials was tramping through Columnists the woods and fields of Click for Downeast Maine Obituaries Mount Desert Island, TIDE CHARTS Business netting and trapping 1001 801000 Milestones every kind of insect he could find. Sports Arts & Entertainment Today, Glen Living Green Mittelhauser and John Maine Photos NOW McDade open drawer Your Photos after drawer of these Blogs beautifully preserved and documented Special Publications specimens - 6,578 when you have Baspoon! Interactive species in all and Glen Mittelhausen examines freshly hydrated, Submit a Letter to the Editor representing possibly century-old marine specimens taken from around Submit Press Release the most complete MDI. LAURIE SCHREIBER PHOTO Submit Story Ideas collection of its kind in POLITICAL Submission Forms North America. Can You Help Us? & RSS Feeds Acadia National Park is home to this century-old historical treasure of insects ELECTION Specialties and marine invertebrates, taken from around Mount Desert Island during a Chambers of Commerce 27-year study. NEWS Cooking All together, the collection comprises about Health & Well-Being 20,000 pinned and wet specimens, along with Home & Garden Calendar of Events logs, field notes, and publications associated with Horoscopes the work, undertaken from 1927-1945 by Dr. February 2008 Lighthouses & Harbors Procter, a Bar Harbor summer resident and a S M T W T F S Volunteering Community respected scientist. Service 1 2 Contact Us 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 With the completion last year of an up-to-date Our Staff 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 electronic catalogue of the marine specimens, and Circulation Subscribe next year's publication of the insect inventory, 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Newspaper Printing Service Glen Mittelhauser and his colleague, Anne Swann, 24 25 26 27 28 29 Advertising Rates along with Acadia's museum technician John Employment Opportunities McDade, will have made it possible for researchers to compare populations of the present http://www.mainecoastnow.com/articles/2007/12/04/bar_harbor_times/local_news/doc474... 2/27/2008 (Maine News) MaineCoastNOW.com- - Your daily source for local news, sports, enterta Page 2 of 4 What do you think of Ralph with the past, see what's changed, and, perhaps Nader entering the most importantly, use their findings as another Presidential race as an avenue for figuring out the role played by human Independent? impacts - such as pollution, fishing, and global He is a legitimate warming - on entomological and marine life. candidate "This is a gold mine that's really unique to North He's going to take votes America," says Mr. Mittelhauser. "You can't find away from one of the major party candidates an equivalent. We've got to start, hopefully next year, to look at what's changed." He never should have entered the race Mr. Mittelhauser is in the second year of a three- Vote year contract with the National Park Service. A View Results naturalist and founder of the Gouldsboro-based nonprofit organization Maine Natural History Observatory, which is dedicated to the inventory and long-term monitoring of species and habitats Web along coastal Maine, he has documented and published a series of field guides, replete with MaineCoastNOW.com color photographs. For the last 20 years, he has conducted numerous surveys of wintering Google Search waterbirds, focusing on the status and ecology of two species of concern - harlequin ducks and Proctor butterflies purple sandpipers. His most recent publication, with master Maine guide and voluntourism operator Darrin Kelly, is this year's "Inventory of Marine Fauna in Frenchman Bay and Blue Hill Bay, Maine 1926-1932" (For any of the publications, available with a donation, contact Mr. Mittelhauser at 963-2012 or glenm@acadia.net). Although he spends much of his time in the field, his expertise made him a natural choice for the inventory. Often, that involves what Mr. Mittelhauser calls "database geek" work - deciphering Dr. Procter's tidy but tiny and sometimes archaic script on the small labels that go with each specimen, cross-referencing the information with Dr. Procter's field notes, noting the condition of each individual, electronically recording the information as a series of monographs, and searching the current taxonomy for nomenclature updates. Mr. Mittelhauser credits Ms. Swann for her wizardry with the work. The main challenge in writing up the catalogue is that species names used by Dr. Procter date back six or seven decades. "As new information becomes available, what a species is called might have changed," Mr. Mittelhauser says. "So it makes the collection difficult to use. Scientific names that are many generations out of date are not useful without some extensive work." The electronic catalogue will be particularly useful to the entomological community, he says. "If a Lepidoptera biologist wants to see what's changed, he'll have all the information for what was around a hundred years ago," he says. "And we have Procter's field notes as well, so it's amazing information. Many other insect collections are not very detailed - maybe a location and a date. There tends to be a fair bit of detail with Procter's collection. Plus, he cross- referenced his collection numbers with his notes." Although Acadia National Park annually conducts what they call BioBlitzes, the event, which draws scores of participants, only focuses on a selected species during a single weekend in one area of the park. "We can't hope to collect the diversity of insects that Procter got," says Mr. McDade. William Procter, who died in 1951 at age 79, was a grandson of the founder of the Procter and Gamble Company. His early career was in business, including some time as the director of Procter and Gamble. But in his 30s, he began studies in zoology and ended up devoting the rest of his life to biology. In 1921, he set up a research laboratory on Mount Desert Island, where he had spent summers since he was a boy. His lab, at first, was associated with the MDI Biological Laboratory, but after various disagreements, he instituted a new lab on his estate, called Corfield, outside of Bar Harbor. Most of his early work was devoted to a study of marine fauna from Frenchman and Blue Hill bays. From a dock on his property, he and his crew http://www.mainecoastnow.com/articles/2007/12/04/bar_harbor_times/local_news/doc474... 2/27/2008 (Maine News) MaineCoastNOW.com- - Your daily source for local news, sports, enterta. Page 3 of 4 ran a 55-foot research boat with a shallow-water dredge of his own design, hauling up bottom muck to a screening area and sorting table in the cockpit. The specimens were housed in aquaria in his lab, and eventually ended up in rubber-stopped vials, preserved in ethanol. Mr. Mittelhauser, who rehydrated the critters, estimates there are at least a dozen individuals for each species. "He wasn't just interested in the big stuff," says Mr. Mittelhauser. "He was pulling parasites off of fish. You'd think there'd be a good understanding of the marine invertebrates in Frenchman Bay. But this inventory in the 1930s is the best inventory we have for Frenchman Bay." At around the same time, the Boston (now New England) Society of Natural History selected MDI for a detailed study of insect fauna. When the director of the study died, in 1932, Dr. Procter took up the work with the same vigor he had bestowed on the marine collection. Every summer, usually from early May into October, he combed MDI for insects, using species-specific collection techniques that haven't changed much to this day. Some were taken with nets. Moths were caught in light traps. For tiny insects, a cloth could be dragged through a bush or the grass. Trees were shaken. An aspirator was used to suck insects from the air. By 1945, the year the final volume of his study was published, he had set up 421 field stations, a number that increased when he went freelance to continue the inventory on his own. By 1946, he had amassed records from MDI of 6,578 species of insects, and more than 500 marine invertebrates, including what were at the time 22 newly discovered species, all painstakingly preserved, labeled, and cross-referenced with his field notes. Upon Dr. Procter's death, the collection left Maine and took up residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, thanks to his friendship with a biologist there, according to one obituary. In 1999, the National Park Service brought the collection back to MDI, where it resides in the William Otis Sawtelle Collections and Research Center at Acadia National Park's headquarters. The University of Massachusetts still owns the collection. The insect collection is now housed in tall steel cabinets fitted top to bottom with drawers made of fragrant cedar and lidded with clear glass. Each drawer holds a dozen or so trays of insects, the number depending on the size of the insects. Each tray holds a different species. Marine specimens are housed in similar cabinets fitted with open shelves to accommodate hundreds of vials. Mr. Mittelhauser pulls out a drawer of flamboyantly patterned butterflies, another of nasty-looking mosquitoes, some wasps and beetles that look far bigger than those found today. The specimens, he agrees, are in great shape - the butterflies, painstakingly dried and mounted on pins, have their wings, still colorful, spread in full display. Long, fragile antennae and legs of other insects are intact. The delicate forms of tiny bugs, such as midges, can be seen attached to miniscule paper wedges, which are mounted on pins. "It's such a huge collection, over a long period of time," he says. "It's hard to know if we'd still find all of these insects. I love just pulling these out and looking at the diversity." Reader Messages There are No comments posted. 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ID: *Password: *Create a Member ID: http://www.mainecoastnow.com/articles/2007/12/04/bar_harbor_times/local_news/doc474... 2/27/2008 Islander PAGE 14 SECTION 1 6/14/2018 Fund honors William Procter BAR HARBOR - The Wil- tory, for which he served as liam Procter Scientific Innova- trustee and president. Under tion Fund has been established the influence of early natural- at the MDI Biological Labora- ists like Louis Agassiz, a Har- tory in honor of William Proct- vard professor who urged his er (1873-1951), a businessman, students to "study nature, not entrepreneur and scientist: books," he established a re- Procter's seven-part "Biologi- search station at the laboratory cal Survey of the Mount Des- in 1921. Though he would later ert Region," published between relocate to a larger facility at 1927 and 1946, has been an his summer cottage, Corfield, invaluable resource for biolo- in Bar Harbor, the buildings he gists studying the fauna of the constructed remain. Mount Desert region. Today, Procter's collec- The fund will provide up to tion is housed at the William $50,000 annually to full-time Otis Sawtelle Collections and faculty members, students or William Procter Research Center at the head- research fellows at the MDI quarters of Acadia National Biological Laboratory or its Park in Bar Harbor, where it spinoffs to support areas in- therapies to treat major diseas- is used to study changes that cluding high-risk/high-impact es and improve quality of life. have occurred in insect and research, basic scientific re- Procter was the grandson marine life, Procter's main ar- search with potential for com- of William Procter, founder eas of interest. Scott Swann, a mercialization and education of Procter & Gamble, and an lecturer in natural history at programs focused on translat- active board member until the College of the Atlantic in ing scientific discoveries into his death. He also was a co- Bar Harbor, has called the sur- commercial applications. owner of Procter and Borden, vey "a brilliant data set that is "We are enormously grate- a Manhattan securities firm. stunning, complete, and me- ful for the establishment of the But his real love was science, ticulous." Procter Fund, which will sup- to which he devoted most of Procter's interest in inno- port research that may be per- his life. In addition to the sur- vation grew out of his board ceived as conceptually risky by vey, which he launched at the membership at Procter & traditional funding sources," MDI Biological Laboratory Gamble. "For more than 175 said Kevin Strange, president in the 1920s, he was an active years, innovation has been in of the laboratory. "The fund supporter of many scientific our DNA," reads a company honors the legacy of Procter, causes and organizations. slogan. One of the company's who as a creative businessman "Procter's interest was in the innovators was Procter's far- recognized the need for out- diversity of life," said Strange. ther, Harley Thomas Procter, a of-the-box approaches to make "Though nearly a century has marketing pioneer who turned revolutionary advances." elapsed since he began his P&G into a household name The fund was established work here, we are still study- with his decision to rename its by a member of Procter's fam- ing that diversity. Our focus is soap "Ivory." ily in honor of his achieve- on studying diverse, highly re- Procter is also known in ments in science and busi- generative animals in order to the scientific world for his ness. Strange and his wife and develop drugs that trigger our establishment in 1950 of the laboratory manager Rebecca innate capacities for regenera- William Procter Prize for Sci- Morrison attracted the interest tion. In his combined interests entific Achievement. The prize of the donor by highlighting in nature and entrepreneur- is awarded annually by Sigma the parallels between Procter's ship, Procter anticipated where Xi, a scientific research honor achievements and the institu- the institution is today." society. The awardees include tion's current focus on translat- Procter made significant the most illustrious scientific ing scientific discoveries into contributions to the labora- names of the modern era.