Dr Lim takes prize in honour of our Maude
RECENTLY at a ceremony in University College Cork, the prestigious Maude Delap prize was presented by the School of Biological Earth and Environmental Sciences (BEES) to the PhD student who published the best peer-reviewed paper in the school.
Dr Aaron Lim was awarded the prize for a PhD on the cold water corals which have been discovered in canyons off the Porcupine Bank.
Maude Delap was born in Templecrone Rectory, Donegal, the seventh child of ten of Rev Alexander Delap and Anna Jane (née Goslett).
In 1874, when Maude was aged eight, the family moved to Valentia when her father became the Rector of the Island and Cahirsiveen. Maude and her sisters received very little formal education in contrast to their brothers, though they benefited from some progressive primary school teaching. She and her sister Constance were encouraged in their interest in zoology and biology by their father, who himself published notes in the Irish Naturalist and elsewhere.
Maude and her sister Constance were prolific collectors of marine specimens, many of which are now housed within the collections of the Natural History Museum, Dublin. Based on their work, a survey was undertaken by the Royal Irish Academy headed by Edward T. Browne of the University of London in 1895 and 1896.
Following this collaboration Maude and Constance continued to collect specimens through dredging and tow-netting as well as recording sea temperature and changes in marine life. Maude kept in correspondence with Browne, sending specimens and drawings, until his death in 1937.
She became increasingly interested in the life cycle of various species of jellyfish, being the first person to successfully breed them in captivity in her home laboratory using homemade aquariums. She bred them in bell jars and published the results, observing their breeding and feeding habits. Her laboratory was referred to as the department, which her nephew, Peter Delap, described as “an heroic jumble of books, specimens, aquaria, with its pervasive low-tide smell.”
Due to her contributions to marine biology she was offered a position in 1906 in the Plymouth Marine Biological Station.
She declined due to her father’s reaction, which reputedly was: “No daughter of mine will leave home, except as a married woman.” Delap’s interest continued in many forms of flora and fauna, which included the identification of a True’s beaked whale, washed up on the island. This was a whale species that was previously only known through an incomplete specimen from the United States.
Maude Delap had a sea anemone named in her honour, Edwardsia Delapia, which she first recorded in eel-grass on Valentia Island’s shores. This anemone is found in shallow sea water and it is unknown outside Valentia Island.