John Stanley Gardiner

John Stanley Gardiner (1872–1946) was a British zoologist.

Stanley, as he was known, was the younger son of John Jephson Gardiner and Sarah McTier. He was born in Jordanstown (Belfast) in 1872 – two years after his brother Arthur. Jephson was a member of the Anglican clergy and, at the time of his marriage to Sarah in 1868, was chaplain to Lord Dufferin at Carrickfergus (near Belfast). Stanley's mother died five months after he was born and in 1874, he and Arthur were taken by their father to England. They initially lived in Marshfield, Wiltshire, with Jephson having the position of Curate there. In 1876, Jephson and his two sons moved to Wonersh, near Guildford, Surrey. There Arthur and Stanley were pupils at a boarding school at 108 High Street, Guildford.

Stanley attended Marlborough College from January 1885 until July 1890. While there "his critical thinking was shaped by the science masters and where he was a great supporter of the school's Natural History Society". Stanley won an exhibition to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and became a member of the college in 1891. He studied zoology and graduated in 1894 with a first class degree in Natural Sciences. He played hockey for Cambridge in 1894.

The period from 1896 to 1909 was spent by Stanley in doing field work in coral research. He spend considerable time in remote locations in the Indian Ocean as a member of three expeditions. He was particularly fascinated by marine biology and in 1896, aged 26, he joined the Royal Society Expedition to Funafuti in the Ellice Islands in the Pacific. This must have been a very formative experience for thereafter he devoted much of his research to the scleractinian corals and the environmental factors influencing their distribution. This research encompassed not only the identification and taxonomy of corals but also studies of their growth rates and feeding biology. Much of his subsequent work was carried out in the Indian Ocean, first of all in the Laccadives and Maldives and then through expeditions to the Chagos Archipelago, Seychelles, Admirantes, Coetivy, Cargados Carajos, Farquhar, Providence, St. Pierre and Mauritius. He was certainly an early pioneer in coral reef research not only in terms of his careful observational work on Indian Ocean reefs, many of whom have not been revisited by modern scientists, but also in the wide range of research he undertook into the biology of corals.

...
Wikipedia