Charles Marcus Breder Jr.

Biographical Background

Breder showed a keen interest in nature at a young age.  Although he never went to college, he read profusely on natural history and at the age of 22 he got a job as scientific assistant with the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in Washington, D.C.  In 1921 he started working at the New York Aquarium landing the position of Curator in 1937.  In 1941 he was appointed visiting professor (teaching ichthyology) to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the New York University in 1941 a position he continued on until 1950.  In 1944, he was named Curator and Chairman of the Department of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a position he held until 1965.  This is interesting since Breder was not particularly interested in systematics (Atz 1986). Other professional positions included Administrative Director for the Lerner Marine Laboratory on North Bimini, the Bahamas (1947-1957), Adviser to the Board of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory and Senior Research Associate at the Mote Marine Laboratory.   He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Newark, which was later incorporated into Rutgers University.

Dr. Breder married three times; first to Ruth B. Demarest on 18 November 1918, a marriage that produced two sons: Charles Marcus Breder III and Richard Frederick Breder.  His second was to Ethel Lear Snyder on 17 April 1933, who later died of cancer.  His third was to Priscilla Rasquin, a former student and lab assistant of him at the American Museum of Natural History, on 3 January 1967. 

Involvement on Hypogean Fish Research

After learning about the newly described troglomorphic Astyanax fasciatus and hearing Myron Gordon’s account of his recent trip to Mexico, Breder took the initiative of organizing and leading an expedition to Mexico to perform field studies, obtain enough ecological information for a cave habitat display for the Aquarium, to shoot a documentary to be presented at the 1941 annual meeting of the New York Zoological Society and, most importantly, to bring back enough fish to conduct extensive laboratory research (Breder 1942, Romero 1984, 1986a).

Between 1940 and 1954 Breder (sometimes coauthoring with Edward Bellamy Gresser or Priscilla Rasquin) published 17 papers (168 printed pages of information) on which Astyanax was the major subject of research.  Most of the research concentrated on behavior, particularly responses to light and chemicals.  But he also published on the fish sensory organs, metabolism, genetics, ecology, and evolution.  Because the cave and the surface forms interbreed to produce fertile hybrids, he was the first who strongly suspected that the blind depigmented form was nothing but a remarkably locally-adapted population of the surface species Astyanax fasciatus well before advanced genetic techniques proved it.  Many of Breder’s contributions are still cited and several of his associates and students embarked in researching this cave fish.  There is no question that Breder was the dominant figure in hypogean fish research in the 1940s and 50s.