Flora was his interest and prime course of study: a botanical career for W.E. Ricker disappears

Synopsis

Bill Ricker,s career went through many twists in his academic years. He had taken botany in his senior matriculation year at high school and he had collected over 100 species of flora before commencement of university life. At the conclusion of his first university year, he set out over the summer to collect a much larger sample of species, primarily from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence ecoregion, to fulfil a requirement for a second year botany course (spermatophytes). He identifed about 390 species, and some 254 were collected and pooled with those from previous years to make a final submission of 354 spermatophyte species. Field plant identification continued in each academic year thereafter, in concert with collections and identifications of aquatic invertebrates in his summer projectswhile under the employment of theOntario Fisheries ResearchLaboratory. At the conclusion of his undergraduate years, Bill had taken more courses in botany than in zoology, and it was the summer employment that had really prepared him for postgraduate work in fisheries biology, which was ecologically oriented. When Bill left Ontario in the autumn of 1931 he had identi.ed over 600 species of plants, excluding lower cryptogams, but including many aquatic species of higher plants. In western North America Bill,s botanical careerbegan atCultusLake in 1931. Heagain studied all aspects of the basinwhileemployed with the federal government, and from the work he assembled a Ph.D. thesis. At the time of thesis completion he had identi.ed over 300 species of .ora, including alpine plants at timberline, 1500 – 1800 m above lake level, and planktonic algae in its water column. In 1939, after more field fisheries work in the Fraser River basin of British Columbia, Bill accepted a position with the biological staff at IndianaUniversity. In this periodwhich concluded in 1950 he identi.ed another 50 – 110 species of flora, all in the Carolinian ecoregion, and hitherto not seen by him. Considering all floral classes, Bill,s eastern North American repertoire had by then added up to 791 species, representative of more than 112 families of plants. Returning west for the remainder of his life, new identifications elsewhere added to his Cultus Lake list which slowly added up to about 1000 species for the west coastal region ofNorthAmerica. Flora was also identified elsewhere in the mid-continental region of NorthAmerica, in Eurasiawhere theAbisko region ofLappland was a highlight, and in SouthAmerica and New Zealand. Records of his botanical prowess, were kept primarily in his diaries, which began in 1923 and were maintained consistently to the end of 1934, and thereafter intermittently to 1949. The diaries reveal that his career as a budding botanist was subtly hijacked by a wily Professor W.H.K. Harkness in the rival Biology Department who outmanoeuvred Drs. R.B. Thompson and R.A. Sifton in the Botany Department. The former always managed to employ Bill in summer and keep him occupied in the department,s labs during the autumnandwinter and spring, tying up any free time when the botanist had approached him on lab work. Certainly, the botany courses taken andwhich he excelled atweremore appropriate for his aquatic ecological pursuits. Salesmanshipwon the day for the zoologists, but Bill was a life-long botanist regardless of whatever else he studied or managed throughout his professional career. The last days of his life had a botanical conclusion.