G. Evelyn Hutchinson

Hutchinson married three times. His first wife was Grace Pickford. Grace was also Cambridge educated, she became a well known scientist as well. They were married from 1931 to 1933, when they agreed to a divorce. He met his second wife, Margaret Seal, while on a boat returning to England from India. She was a musician and they shared an appreciation for music, literature, and art. They were married for fifty years, with no children. She died of Alzheimer's in 1983. Hutchinson's third marriage occurred while he was into his eighties to Anne Twitty, a biologist of Haitian descent. He survived all three of his wives and died in London, May 17, 1991.

After graduating, he went to Italy to study octopuses. Next he travelled to South Africa where he discovered the field of limnology or the study of freshwater systems, on the shallow lakes near Cape Town. He became an international expert on lakes and wrote a four-volume Treatise on Limnology, with the first volume published in 1957. He took a position teaching zoology at Yale University in 1928. He travelled widely, reaching underexplored parts of the world and writing his first book on the ecology of high-elevation lakes in India. At Yale his graduate students influenced him to research new areas.

In 1949, Hutchinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1950 to the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 1952 Leidy Award from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1983, awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1986, and posthumously the National Medal of Science in 1991.

Due to Hutchinson, the European attitudes towards ecology entered America. Before Hutchinson, ecology and natural history were considered identical. After Hutchinson it became legitimate to study the physical and chemical properties of ecosystems in their own right. Hutchinson also raised the idea of climate change 30 years before the problem became popular. He taught his students as early as 1947 that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to a global temperature increase. He considered the causes and preventatives for extinction, resource management, and the social anthropology of endangered cultures decades before they were attracting attention as crises. He influenced many different areas of ecology, contributing to his designation as the "Father of Modern Ecology". His many graduate students went on to careers in ecology. He was the first to describe and resolve the paradox of the plankton in 1961. Upon his death, Yvette H. Edmondson noted "The era that ended with G.E. Hutchinson's death was not only that of a thoughtful man and the growth of a science imprinted by his thinking. Even more sadly, we may be seeing the end of an intellectual climate in which the sparking mind of one individual can so illuminate a science. Science by committee casts a very different light." In 1982, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, now called the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, honored Hutchinson by creating the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award, one of the Society's major awards that is given annually to recognize excellence in any aspect of limnology or oceanography.

In 1932 Hutchinson joined the Yale North India Expedition. He wanted to be the first to make ecological observations of a high-altitude lake, and to compare these with lower-altitude lakes. The work yielded insights into biogeography and new data on high elevation limnology. Most lakes had no fish, and crustaceans were the top predators. In letters to his wife, he described the different water chemistry from the Indian lakes to the South African lakes. He collected hundreds of specimens for analysis by specialists. This expedition provided the material for his first book, The Clear Mirror, in which he described the colors, organisms, ecology, and the people of the Ladakh.

In 1926 he applied for a lectureship at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He lectured for two years before he was fired, but he continued to study the South African water bugs. When he began his research there were fourteen known species and when he concluded his research there were nearly forty. It was here that Hutchinson discovered limnology, or the study of fresh waters. Along with Grace Pickford, he studied the chemistry and biology of the coastal lakes. He was greatly interested in limnology due to it combining of all his interests such as natural history, aquatic invertebrates, and chemistry. He was drawn to the differences in the chemistry, flora, and fauna in the different water sources. While in South Africa in the late 1920s he frequently visited the southeastern portion of the country, in particular conducting biology and chemistry research in Morgans Bay and St Lucia, he also spent a lot of time around the Sani Pass and the Drakensberg Mountains as well as the area around Royal Natal National Park. He became somewhat of a minor celebrity in Natal during this time.

George Evelyn Hutchinson ForMemRS (January 30, 1903 – May 17, 1991) was a British ecologist sometimes described as the "father of modern ecology." He contributed for more than sixty years to the fields of limnology, systems ecology, radiation ecology, entomology, genetics, biogeochemistry, a mathematical theory of population growth, art history, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. He worked on the passage of phosphorus through lakes, the chemistry and biology of lakes, the theory of interspecific competition, and on insect taxonomy and genetics, zoo-geography and African water bugs. He is known as one of the first to combine ecology with mathematics. He became an international expert on lakes and wrote the four-volume Treatise on Limnology in 1957.

Hutchinson was born in 1903 to Arthur and Evaline D. Hutchinson. He grew up in Cambridge, England. His father was a mineralogist at the University of Cambridge. Hutchinson grew up surrounded by intellectuals, including two of Darwin's sons. By the age of five, Hutchinson was already collecting aquatic creatures and studying their preferred living environment in aquariums that he manufactured himself. He had a younger brother and a younger sister. He had his early education at Saint Faith's. He went on in 1917 to study at Gresham's School in Norfolk. Gresham's was unique in not focusing on the classics, but including more intensive studies of mathematics and science, along with modern languages and history. It was here that he began to notice that organisms had different chemical environments. Hutchinson was admitted to read zoology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1925.