Tyler emerges from the sapropel diffidently, to venture a retrospective pot pourri of Australian limnological life over the past sixty years. He is lost in today’s new World and troubled he has to resort to unavoidable geographical and autobiographical bias in the selected excerpta vitae.
Tyler was a shutterbug and routinely carried 16 mm movie cameras and tape recorders on his field trips. In this Lungfish Lecture, he delves with retrophiliac relish into his archive to portray, by live voice over muted footage, vignettes of those analogue days, of the fight for Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, the discovery of new, distinctively Australian microbes, of the excruciating beauty and limnological virtuosity of Tasmania’s montane lakeland, of some large environmental experiments, and of the activities and antics of limnologists, with deliberate snatches of levity.
Peter Tyler came to Limnology in a roundabout way. Courses in the subject were rare anywhere in the world in the 1950s, and Tyler did 3 years of Botany, Zoology and Chemistry, followed by an Honours year specialising in plant sociology and the ecology of ombrogenous bogs. He commenced postgraduate research in the Botany Department, University of Tasmania in 1962, fathoming the deposition, by an oligocarbophilic stalked bacterium, Hyphomicrobium, of deposits of manganese oxides lining pipelines of the Hydro Electric Commission, with consequent diminished power generation carrying a severe financial penalty. The distribution of infection clearly indicated a catchment influence, necessitating investigating lakes, lakes and lakes. This meant limnology, so Tyler and his first student learnt it together, on the lake. Tyler soon abandoned bacteriology for a besotting love affair with Tasmania’s Lakeland which, then, was virtually his private domain. He joined the nascent Australian Society for Limnology in 1963 and took part in the naissance of Australian Limnology as a subject sui generis, as it fledged the nest of its fosters, inland fisheries and water supply husbandry.
As Australian limnology gathered strength its practitioners, far from casting off its parents, joined forces, eagerly participating in addressing potent problems of the day, synoptically water quality. But major new challenges arose with public questioning of the antique credo that Man was on Earth to conquer Nature. The first major gauntlet was the precipitate decision to “somewhat modify” Lake Pedder. Young ASL members mounted frantic, unfunded expeditions to document its limnology and biology as public dissent mounted. Contemporaneously, Lagoon of Islands, a barely known wetland. with a unique hydroseral succession of endemic plants, was imperilled, but Tyler and botanist Bill Jackson were virtually its only champions.
The battle to save Lake Pedder was lost, but it spawned green politics in Australia and, when the Franklin River was threatened, a nation-wide professional protest campaign brought Federal government intervention and much of the South West of Tasmania was proclaimed a World Heritage National Park.
As Australian lakes were studied more and more, a considerable degree of endemism, long known in the macroscopic aquatic fauna, was recognized in the Protista, then mostly called algae and protozoa. Some became “Australian flagship taxa” with highly distinctive features setting them apart from the rest of the World. In Tasmania, an apparent stronghold of protistan endemism, the search for such prizes, and the attendant typological cataloguing of about 300 montane lakes, was greatly aided by years of exciting aerial limnology.
Among the many treasures of Tasmania’s Lakeland were the meromictic lakes of the Gordon River, whose special properties of repute attracted a steady stream of overseas visitors, and provided Tyler and his team with 20 years of gratifying limnology. But impending operation of the new Gordon River Power Station sounded the death knell for meromixis Maintenance of the condition, required by ordinance of World Heritage listing, was explored, in cooperation with the Hydro-Electric authorities, by transferring a portion of the Indian Ocean into the monimolimnion of Lake Fidler.
As the time for Tyler to sink to the sediments approached, strong community calls surfaced for the unplugging and restoration of Lake Pedder. Gainsayers deemed that impossible. Its structure would be destroyed, its flanking dunes thrashed by wave action, its watercourses and lake bed filled in by metres of silt. The Senate in Canberra instituted an enquiry. The obvious first question was whether the lake was destroyed or intact beneath storm tossed waters. A team from Deakin Warrnambool investigated, and found, with deep satisfaction, that Pedder is a latent Phoenix, intact in fine detail, and likely to remain so for at least the rest of this century. And at Lagoon of Islands, half a century after innundation, the dam was bulldozed, the native water levels restored, and Nature began the re-enactment of the hydrosere.
Such gratification at the end of a career could never have been be imagined.