Leslie William Knapp (1929–2017)

L ESLIE WILLIAM KNAPP was born in Auburn, New York on November 17, 1929 and died May 17, 2017 in Maryland. He graduated from Port Byron Central School, Port Byron, New York in 1947. Les is survived by his wife Betty who runs a greenhouse business, Loch Less Farm, and their two sons. Les entered the College of Agriculture of Cornell University in September 1948 and received his B.S. degree in 1952. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served from 1952 to 1954. He entered the University of Missouri in February 1955 and completed his master’s degree in August 1958, ‘‘A distributional study of the fishes of the upper White River, Missouri,’’ studying under Arthur Witt, Jr. In September 1958 he began his ichthyological studies under Edward C. Raney at Cornell University and received his Ph.D. degree in February 1964 studying the systematics of the Rainbow Darter, Etheostoma caeruleum. This was a busy time for darter studies at Cornell with Robert V. Miller, William Richards, and me all studying different groups of darters under the guidance of Edward Raney. From Cornell, Les was hired by the Smithsonian Oceanographic Sorting Center in Washington, D.C., which was just getting started, to process material collected by expeditions such as the International Oceanographic Campaign. Les published seven studies on darters from 1963 to 1976, including joining me to produce a catalog of all type specimens of all the darters (Collette and Knapp, 1967). Les then turned his efforts to studying two families of marine fishes, the flatheads, Platycephalidae and Bembridae, publishing 24 papers from 1973 to 2012, seven with Hisashi Imamura from Japan. He also completed the sections on Bembridae and Platycephalidae which are still in press in the long-delayed volumes of Fishes of the Western Indian Ocean (Table 1).