Gretchen Lambert: taxonomist, explorer, and historian of the ascidian community. Active: 1968-present

Abstract

Gretchen Lambert (nee Shapiro) was born in Duluth, Minnesota, USA in 1941, and spent a large portion of her childhood at a wilderness fly-in fishing and hunting resort in Ontario, Canada. Her interest in marine biology was ignited in the 1950s when she visited the Florida Keys with her father. Lambert earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota in Zoology in 1963 (magna cum laude). From 1964 to 1965, Lambert worked at the University of Miami Institute of Marine Science in Miami, Florida, USA. In 1965, she moved to the University of Washington to start her Master's Degree in Zoology, which she obtained in 1967. She worked with the influential marine ecologist Robert Paine. During her time at the University of Washington, she met Charles Lambert, who became her partner in life and research. Very early on, Charles convinced her of the experimental advantages of ascidians as research animals. From 1970 to 1998, she and Charles worked at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). Gretchen was a lecturer, a museum coordinator, a laboratory coordinator for introductory biology, a research associate and a senior research associate. She and Charles worked closely together on ascidian ecology and development.

In 1998, she and Charles retired from CSUF and moved to Seattle, Washington, USA. After retirement, the couple continued their research unabated. For most of the 2000s, they spent every summer at the Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington State, USA. During the spring, summer and fall they worked on manuscripts together. In the 2000s, Gretchen took on an increasing number of leadership positions at the Friday Harbor Laboratories. She co-organized the International Tunicata Meeting twice, and has participated several times in the International Invasive Sea Squirt Conference and the International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions. Lambert has also been an instrumental editor of WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species), which is the definitive species list for ascidians. Since 1975, she has written “Ascidian News” twice a year. “Ascidian News” provides the ascidian community with research updates, conference abstracts, and citations for new publications.

For the last 45 years, Lambert has been one of the world's most active ascidian taxonomists. She has done taxonomic consulting for the Coral Reef Research Foundation, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, and fisheries departments in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States. She has been on 21 taxonomic expeditions since 2003, focusing on the Eastern Pacific region but also in Guam, the Northeastern U.S., Florida, the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, the English Channel and Singapore. Since 2001, she has organized and taught at least 25 workshops, training hundreds of researchers in ascidian taxonomy and identification. Lambert has closely mentored Jenn Dijkstra, a Research Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire, and Lauren Stefaniak, an Assistant Professor at Coastal Carolina University.

Since 1968, Gretchen Lambert has published 82 articles and is still publishing. Her first article, from her Master's thesis, focused on the succession (change over time) of the species Corella willmeriana in the fouling community, including predation and interspecific competition (Lambert, 1968). This was one of the early papers in the subsequently well-studied field of fouling ascidian ecology. After arriving at CSUF, one of Lambert's major research foci was the ultrastructure of spicule mineralization in several ascidian species including Bathypera feminalba, Cystodytes lobatus, Herdmania momus, and Pyura pachydermatina (Lambert, 1979; Lambert, 1992; Lambert, 1998; Lambert & Lambert, 1987; Lambert & Lambert, 1996; Lambert & Lambert, 1997; Lambert, Lambert, & Lowenstam, 1989).

A second major research focus was regional ascidian biodiversity. Lambert wrote the Class Ascidiacea chapter of the Taxonomic Atlas of the Benthic Fauna of the Santa Maria Basin and Western Santa Barbara Channel (Lambert, 1996). She co-authored multiple Class Ascidiacea chapters of The Light and Smith's Manual of Intertidal Invertebrates from Central California to Oregon, updated most recently in 2007 (Abbott, Lambert, Lambert, & Newberry, 2007). She also co-authored, with Charles Lambert and Eugene Kozloff, the Phylum Urochordata chapter in Marine Invertebrates of the Pacific Northwest (Lambert, Lambert, & Kozloff, 1996). Finally, she edited a book series on the Reef and Shore Fauna of Hawaii (Abbott, Newberry, & Morris, 1997). Lambert's other research interests during her time at CSUF were ascidian life history (Lambert, Lambert, & Lambert, 1995), algal symbionts of ascidians (Lambert, Lambert, & Waaland, 1996), and phylogenetic implications of morphological characters such as tunic cuticular protrusions (Hirose, Lambert, Kusakabe, & Nishikawa, 1997).

In the mid-1990s, the Lamberts started to systematically track the non-native ascidian species in harbors and marinas in southern California. They visited over 30 marinas in the fall and spring each year from 1994 to 1998, and noted the abundance of each species. These surveys provided a critical baseline for future studies of non-native ascidians in the area, as well as valuable information about salinity and temperature tolerances in these species (Lambert & Lambert, 1998; Lambert & Lambert, 2003).

Since 2000, Lambert has focused much of her attention on the spread of nonindigenous ascidian species across the globe, identifying Corella eumyota in France (Lambert, 2004), Perophora japonica in California (Lambert, 2005), Molgula ficus in California (Lambert, 2007), Molgula citrina in Alaska (Lambert, Shenkar, & Swalla, 2010), Botrylloides giganteus in the Mediterranean and Pacific (Rocha et al., 2019), and Ascidiella aspersa in California (Nydam, Nichols, & Lambert, 2022). Lambert led the global collaborative effort to identify the rapidly spreading ascidian Didemnum vexillum (Bullard et al., 2007; Griffith et al., 2009; Lambert, 2009; Stefaniak et al., 2009; Tagliapietra, Keppel, Sigovini, & Lambert, 2012). She also participated in numerous rapid assessment surveys of harbors and marinas in Hawaii (Godwin & Lambert, 2000), Guam (Lambert, 2003a, 2003b) (Figure 1), the Gulf of Mexico (Lambert, Faulkes, Lambert, & Scofield, 2005), England (Arenas et al., 2006), Panama (Carman et al., 2011), Singapore (Lee, Teo, & Lambert, 2013), North Carolina (Villalobos, Lambert, Shenkar, & López-Legentil, 2017), the Galapagos (Lambert, 2019a, 2019b), the Madeira Archipelago (Ramalhosa, Gestoso, Rocha, Lambert, & Canning-Clode, 2021), and Puerto Rico (Streit, Lambert, Erwin, & López-Legentil, 2021). She also cataloged the native biodiversity in Alaska (Lambert & Sanamyan, 2001), British Columbia (Lambert, 2019a, 2019b) and Singapore (Lambert, Lee, & Teo, 2021; Lee, Chan, Teo, & Lambert, 2016).

Lambert has described four new ascidian species. From the Pacific Ocean, Trididemnum alexi that she named for her grandson (Lambert, 2003a, 2003b), Eudistoma purpuropunctatum (Lambert, 1989), and Distaplia alaskensis (Lambert & Sanamyan, 2001). From the Red Sea, she described Boltenia yossiloya (Shenkar & Lambert, 2010). In addition, Lambert has been honored by other researchers, who have named three species after her: Ascidia lambertae from the Pacific (Monniot, 2007), Corynascidia lambertae from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica (Sanamyan & Sanamyan, 2002), and Didemnum lambertae from the Atlantic (Rocha, Neves, & Gamba, 2015). The Lamberts were honored together in the name Botryllus lambertorum from the Caribbean (Palomino-Alvarez, Nydam, Rocha, & Simões, 2022).

Lambert's (1997) paper on tunic cuticular protrusions (Hirose et al., 1997), co-authored with Euichi Hirose, Takehiro Kusakabe, and Teruaki Nishikawa, received the Paper of the Year Award by the Japanese Society of Zoologists. In 2017, she received the Tunicate Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 9th International Tunicate Meeting in New York City.