William Edwin Ricker

Place: Waterdown

Born: 1908

Death: 2001

Biography:

Bill Ricker was a noted photographer and a founder of fishery science. He was born in Waterdown, Canada in 1908 and died in 2001. He is best known for the Ricker model, which he developed in his studies of stock and recruitment in fisheries. The model can be used to predict the number of fish that will be present in a fishery. He also had an international standing as an entomologist and a scientific editor. He published 296 papers and books, 238 translations, and 148 scientific or literary manuscripts. He was an authority in the taxonomy of stoneflies and evolved an elegant classification which his fellow entomologists praised as 'a thing of beauty and simplicity that made evolutionary sense'. In fisheries, he researched issues centered on Canadian fisheries and how to manage them. He is known particularly for his 1954 paper on recruitment and stock. He is also known for his Handbook of Computation for Biological Statistics of Fish Populations, published in 1958. This 348-page handbook became the standard reference for students and professionals around the world. In 1950, Ricker became editor of the Journal of the Fisheries Research Board, and during his twelve-year tenure developed this into perhaps the most influential fisheries science journal in the world. In 1969, he reasoned that the quantity of food that could be harvested from the sea would be 150-160 million tonnes or 2.5 times the level in 1968. He demonstrated that an estimate of 100 million tonnes was too low and an estimate of 200 million tonnes was too high. He was also an award-winning photographer for The Birmingham News and worked as a newsman for 13 years.