Carl H. Eigenmann

He graduated from Indiana University (1886) where under the influence of David Starr Jordan (a student of Louis Agassiz’s son, Alexander), he became a biologist particularly interested in fishes.  From 1891 he taught at Indiana University founding and directing the biological station at Winona Lake.  His first experience with troglomorphic fishes took place in 1886 while at Indiana University when he received a living blind fish taken from a well in Corydon, Indiana (Eigenmann 1890).  The next year he married Rosa Smith (1858-1947), the first woman president of the scientific society Sigma-Xi.  In 1889 they established residence in California where he was named Curator of the San Diego Natural History Society.  There, his wife introduced him to the blind goby found among the rocks of the California coast Othonops eos (formerly Typhologobius californiensis) (see Eigenmann 1890 for a historical account of this encounter and how much it impressed him).  In 1891 he was appointed Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, a perfect location to study the blind vertebrates of the caves in the nearby areas.  This motivated him to devote a substantial part of his scientific career to the study of blind vertebrates, most of them in caves (Romero 1986b).
 

Involvement in Hypogean Fish Research

Between 1887 and 1909, much of his work was devoted to comprehending the process of the loss of visual structures in cave vertebrates. In May 1896 he visited Dalton’s Spring (actually a cave-stream) where he secured 20 specimens of Amblyopsis spelaea. This became his favorite collecting locality.  In 1898, Eigenmann published the description of a new species of cave fish with rudimentary eyes from south-western Missouri, Amblyopsis rosae (=Typhlichthys rosae), which he named after his wife.

Amblyopsis rosae (Drawing by E.S. Damstra, published in Romero, 2003a).

Eigenmann extensively visited the caves of Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, and Missouri in search of specimens for his work and in March 1902, he visited Cuba for the first time to secure cave specimens for his comparative studies.  He had been working on fish reproduction in the past and quickly recognized that these two Cuban hypogean fish species were viviparous.

Contrary to Mammoth Cave, Eigenmann found the localities for the Cuban blind fish ‘monotonous’ (Eigenmann 1903).  From 1906 to 1907 he did many laboratory studies in Europe, mostly in Germany, with the Cuban specimens he had collected.  During this period he made plans to visit the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico because of persistent reports of a varied cave fauna in that part of the world.  From 1898 to 1905 Eigenmann published at least 39 papers and abstracts on cave vertebrates, dealing mostly with developmental and anatomical aspects of vision loss in fishes, salamanders, lizards, and mammals as an attempt to understand the underlying process of blindness among hypogean animals.  All this research was summarized in his Cave Vertebrates of North America (Eigenmann 1909), a 341-page, 30-plate monograph.

Although a taxonomist by training, Eigenmann quickly sought answers to the issues of the origin and evolution of the cave fauna. Originally a neo-Lamarckian, Eigenmann thought that the reduction or disappearance of organs among cave animals was a case of convergent evolution, i.e., well-defined conditions of the subterranean environment facilitate the evolutionary changes leading to blindness and depigmentation in a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate organisms which come to inhabit them.  He pointed out that lack of pigmentation had to be understood as the combination of genetically fixed and epigenetically (environmentally-influenced) determined characters; in other words, that although a character was genetically determined, its degree of development may vary under certain light conditions.  For Eigenmann cave evolution was essentially ‘degenerative’ and all successful cave-invaders were somehow pre-adapted to that medium.  The origin of caves and of blind fauna were two distinct questions because of his experience with the blind fish found among the rocks of California’s seacoast.  He insisted on a strong link between ontogeny and phylogeny and his constant use of terms such as ‘phyletic degeneration’ indicates that he held orthogenetic views.  He followed Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) idea that cave faunas were not the result of ‘accidents’ but rather the product of an active process of colonization (Eigenmann 1909).

His last contributions in the field were the descriptions of a new species of blind fish, Trogloglanis pattersoni, from the artesian waters of San Antonio, Texas (Eigenmann 1919).  This description was based on a specimen collected by G. W. Brackenridge of San Antonio, who gave the fish to J. T. Patterson, a professor at the University of Texas, who in turn sent it to Eigenmann at Indiana University.

Trogloglanis pattersoni (Photo by Dean Hendrickson), at http://www.tmm.utexas.edu/tnhc/fish/na/ictaluri/troglogl/tpatters/tpatter4.jpg

Other links to Eigenmann:

http://research.amnh.org/ichthyology/neoich/collectors/cheigen.html