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Dan Livingstone’s career helped to change the way we see the world. The kinds of long-term perspectives on ecological change that he pioneered now serve us well as we struggle to deal with global warming, environmental degradation, and habitat restoration. He launched many scientific careers, including my own when I became his graduate student at Duke University in 1980, and the research initiatives that he instigated continue to inform and inspire. Dan died at home in North Carolina on March 6 after a long battle with a rare form of Parkinson’s Disease. He is survived by his wife, Pat Palmer, his sister, Betty (Jay) Smith, his former wife, Bertha Livingstone, seven children and step-children, and eight grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

Dan was born to Canadian parents in Detroit, MI, and spent most of his youth in Montreal and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. After completing his Ph.D. degree at Yale University, where he studied remote lakes of Alaska under the guidance of Ed Deevey and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Dan spent a year in a post-doctoral position at Cambridge University and then joined the Zoology Department at Duke University in 1956. While at Duke, where he remained for the rest of his career, he mentored a long line of graduate students, many of whom became prominent contributors to the fields of ecology, limnology, fisheries biology, and paleoecology including ecologist Paul Colinvaux, who also passed away recently.

Dan is perhaps best known as the creator of the Livingstone piston sampler, a coring device that he developed at Yale for his work in Alaska and that is now standard equipment for paleolimnologists. Most of his research at Duke, however, focused on the lakes of tropical Africa. Dan never gave me a straight answer as to whether he was closely related to the 19th century explorer of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame. Perhaps not, but the presumed association apparently served him well in the field. I’m told that people whom he met on African expeditions sometimes greeted him with a respectful, “Welcome back.”

In 1960, Dan and his graduate students Bob Kendall and Joe Richardson collected cores from lakes in the Ruwenzori Mountains and at lower elevations in Uganda and Zambia. A 40,000 year old core that Dan and Joe collected from Lake Cheshi was particularly memorable for having been taken using an improvised catamaran fashioned from two dugout canoes because a crocodile had attacked and sunk their inflatable raft the day before—with them aboard. These and later studies on East African rift lakes, the crater lakes of Cameroon, and Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana, produced results that are of continuing importance today.

For example, Dan and Bob were the first scientists to suggest that Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical lake, dried out during what is now recognized as the most severe and widespread Afro-Asian megadrought in the history of anatomically modern humans, some 17,000 years ago. The desiccation also set the stage for the rapid evolution of hundreds of species of endemic cichlid fish. When Lake Victoria refilled 15,000 years ago, it triggered one of the world’s most spectacular examples of “explosive speciation,” now standard material in college biology textbooks.

Some of Dan’s contributions are easily overlooked in part because he did not always seek recognition for them. During the 1980s, Dan was a prime mover behind early plans for deep coring of the African lakes which helped to pave the way for recent drilling projects on Lakes Malawi and Bosumtwi. Dan encouraged the first major geophysical survey of the rift lakes, which introduced me to Africa in 1981 and led to Duke University’s Project PROBE, as a way to identify potential deep drilling sites. Most of the findings of an expedition that he led to Cameroon in 1985, in which he showed graduate student George Kling and me how to haul a 24-m Kullenberg core up through 100 meters of water at Lake Barombi Mbo, appear under the names of others to whom he generously granted first or sole authorship. The Barombi Mbo record showed that Cameroon was a crucial refuge for rainforests during the late Pleistocene megadrought that parched East Africa. When CO2-charged Lake Nyos exploded the following year, killing 1700 people, Dan worked behind the scenes to help George launch intensive follow-up investigations and built a gas-trapping water sampler for me to use at Nyos, as well.

Dan’s many awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Kilham Memorial Lecturer award, the G. E. Hutchinson Medal, and a post as James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Biology and Geology at Duke. Quite a legacy for a man whose research drew an ill-considered “Golden Fleece Award” from a United States senator during the 1970s, in a chilling prelude to more recent attacks on government-funded climate science by members of Congress.

Dan was also a scholar of folklore with an encyclopedic memory for traditional songs of Scotland and Cape Breton. I remember hearing him sing Celtic ballads non-stop for several hours while we rode in the open back of a pick-up truck in Cameroon, and one of his first publications was titled, “Yeahohs and Mating Possums.” His love of language made him a superb and sometimes poetic writer and speaker. In his summary lecture at one of the first major symposia on global warming in 1972, Dan described his feelings on seeing the now-famous Keeling curve of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. What most struck him was not the rising trend due to fossil fuel emissions, but the small seasonal oscillations due to photosynthesis and respiration in forests and oceans. “The majestically rising (and falling) seasonal cycles,” he said, “made me feel as if I had just put my finger on the living, beating heart of the world.”

Last June Bob Kendall, Joe Richardson and I shipped his remaining African cores to the LacCore facility in Minnesota and helped to close up his lab at Duke. When I said my last goodbye at his home in Raleigh, Dan reached up from his bed, took my hand with a smile, and asked, “Are you happy with how your career has turned out?”

Yes I am, Dan, and many others among us feel the same, all thanks to you.

Selected publication

Livingstone DA (1950–1951) The freshwater fishes of Nova Scotia. Proceedings of the Nova Scotia Institute of Science 23: 1–90.

Livingstone DA (1954) On the orientation of lake basins. American Journal of Science 252: 547–554.

Livingstone DA (1955) A lightweight piston sampler for lake deposits. Ecology 36: 137–139.

Livingstone DA (1955) Some pollen profiles from Arctic Alaska. Ecology 36: 587–600.

Livingstone DA (1957) On the sigmoid growth phase in the history of Linsley Pond. American Journal of Science 255: 364–373.

Livingstone DA (1958) Yeahohs and mating possums. Western Folklore 17: 55–56.

Livingstone DA, Bryan K, and Leahy RG (1958) Effects of an arctic environment on the origin and development of freshwater lakes. Limnology and Oceanography 3: 192–214.

Livingstone, DA, and Livingstone BGR (1958) Late-glacial and postglacial vegetation from Gillis Lake in Richmond County, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. American Journal of Science 256: 341–359.

Livingstone DA, Ewing M and Donn WL (1959) Theory of ice ages. Science 129: 463–464.

Livingstone DA (1962) Age of deglaciation in the Ruwenzori Range, Uganda. Nature 194: 859–860.

Richardson JL, and Livingstone, DA (1962) An attack by a Nile crocodile on a small boat. Copeia 1: 203–204.

Livingstone DA (1963) The sodium cycle and the age of the ocean. Geochimica at Cosmochimica Acta 27: 1055–1069.

Livingstone DA (1965) Sedimentation and the history of water level change in Lake Tanganyika. Limnology and Oceanography 10: 607–610.

Kendall RL, and Livingstone DA (1967) Paleoecological studies on the East African plateau. Congrès Panafricain de Préhistoire, Dakar. pp. 386–388.

Livingstone DA (1967) Postglacial vegetation of the Ruwenzori Mountains in equatorial Africa. Ecological Monographs 37: 25–52.

Livingstone DA (1968) Some interstadial and postglacial pollen diagrams from eastern Canada. Ecological Monographs 38: 87–125.

Livingstone DA (1971) Speculations on the climatic history of mankind. American Scientist 59: 332–337.

Livingstone DA (1975) Late Quaternary climate change in Africa. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 6: 249–280.

Livingstone DA, and W. D. Clayton WD (1980) An altitudinal cline in tropical African grass floras and its paleoecological significance. Quaternary Research 13: 392–402.

Livingstone DA (1983) Potential sites for a long core in the East African Rift. Bulletin Centres de Recherche de Exploration-Production Elf-Aquitaine 7: 443–448.

Rosendahl BR., and Livingstone DA (1983) Rift lakes of East Africa: new seismic data and implications for future research. Episodes 1: 14–19.

Ebinger CJ, M. Crow MJ, Rosendahl BR, Livingstone DA, and Lefournier JL (1984) Structural evolution of Lake Malawi, Africa. Nature 308: 627–629.

Stager JC, Reinthal PN, and Livingstone DA (1986) A 25,000-year history for Lake Victoria, East Africa, and some comments on its significance for the evolution of cichlid fishes. Freshwater Biology 16: 15–19.

Talbot MR, and Livingstone DA (1989) Hydrogen index and carbon isotopes of lacustrine organic matter as lake level indicators. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 70: 121–137.

Maley J, Livingstone DA, et al. (1990) Lithostratigraphy, volcanism, paleomagnetism, and palynology of Quaternary lacustrine deposits from Barombi Mbo (Cameroon): Preliminary results. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 42: 319–335.

Livingstone DA (1999) Historical geochemistry of tropical Africa. Verhandlungen des Internationalen Vereinigung Limnologie 27: 27–34 (Kilham Memorial Lecture).

Beuning KRM., Talbot MR, Livingstone DA, and Schmukler G (2003) Sensitivity of carbon isotopic proxies to paleoclimatic forcing: A case study from Lake Bosumtwi, Ghana, over the last 32,000 years. Global and Biogeochemical Cycles 17: 32–31.

Livingstone DA (2003) Global climate change strikes a tropical lake. Science 301: 468–469.

Livingstone DA (2010) Sixty years of paleolimnology. Journal of Paleolimnology 44: 511–515.