Joseph Shapiro, an Icon of Applied Limnology

One of North America’s greatest applied limnologists of the past century passed away on 01 March 2017. Born 24 May 1929 in Montreal, Joe Shapiro obtained his undergraduate B.S. degree at McGill University in 1950, and then went on to gain a Master’s degree under Donald Rawson at the University of Saskatchewan, a Ph.D. with G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale in 1957 (a year before the establishment of the National Science Foundation), and did postdoctoral work with W. T. Edmondson at the University of Washington. All three of his mentors played foundational roles in the field of limnology, and Joe went on to represent them very well. I had the privilege of being Joe’s Ph.D. student from 1973 to 1977. Joe began his career as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1959, and in 1964 became the associate director of the Limnological Research Center (LRC) at the University of Minnesota, where he served in that role and as professor in the Departments of Geology and Ecology and Behavioral Biology until retiring from the university in 1995 (Fig. 1). Over this period, he made enormous contributions in both basic and applied research, was an inspiring teacher, and played a central role in the development of public policies with respect to waterquality control. Per square foot, the tiny LRC was one of the most productive laboratories of limnological research ever housed in North America. While in the “land of 10,000 lakes,” Joe annually taught a course in limnology, with a typical enrollment of ~100 students drawn from a wide array of departments across campus. Joe was an exceptional lecturer, but gave the hardest exams that anyone ever encountered. Indeed, by repeatedly failing them, I nearly flunked out of graduate school, a particularly embarrassing situation given that everyone else was consistently getting grades in excess of 95%. It turned out that everyone (except me) knew that the same exam had been given for many years, during which time some rather convincing answers had been developed and fed back to Joe annually. In an effort to survive, I read Hutchinson’s Treatises on Limnology twice before the final exam, and somehow managed to pass the exam, finding it on my desk a few days later with “Boy, am I glad to see this” scrawled across the top. Graduate students in Joe’s lab were alternatively inspired, mesmerized, and sometimes terrified by the man, without question one of the most creative scientists I have ever met. He worked us very hard (at least we thought so), but he also provided us with enormous opportunities—virtually unlimited resources to do both laboratory and field research. He was an incredible integrative biologist, well before this became a standard field. His earliest work was in chemical limnology (the influence of humic acids on nutrient availability), but over time he moved into algal physiology and thereafter into plankton community ecology, all the while focused on the eutrophication issue. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a raging controversy about the role of phosphorus in lake eutrophication, with the soap industries pushing carbon and/or nitrogen as the limiting nutrients for algal growth in false narratives in an effort to retain phosphorus as chelators in detergents. Joe and several other key limnologists at the time played vital public roles in the development and dissemination of scientific evidence that led to the banning of phosphate use, writing several key governmental reports and testifying before Congress. This was a time of deep controversial engagement between industry and scientists, not unlike the tobacco-cancer wars, and Joe was a legendary soldier in this battle. One of his greatest quotes came in a heated discussion with a “soaper,” who had declared that algal growth caused an increase in phosphorus concentration, causing Joe to point out that this “was like claiming that cancer causes cigarettes.” Throughout his career, Joe was deeply involved in the development of approaches to minimizing the consequences of