Stanley Howard Weitzman 1927-2017
Stanley Howard Weitzman, Research Scientist and Curator of Fishes Emeritus in the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C., died on February 16, 2017 after a brief illness. He was 89.
Stan developed a keen interest in keeping and breeding native and tropical freshwater fishes as a youngster;
this passion remained with him throughout his life and informed his research career. Stan was perhaps best
known to those in the aquarium hobby and trade as an influential expert on the comparative anatomy, systematics,
and biogeography of the characiform fishes of South America, particularly the small, colorful tetras.
But he also had an abiding interest in killifishes, especially the South American annuals which he adopted as
a research model to study senescence while teaching anatomy at Stanford University in the early 1960s. With
Stanford colleague John Wourms, he described an extraordinary endemic Venezuelan species of annual killifish,
Terranatos dolichopterus (Weitzman and Wourms, 1967).
Stan was born on March 16, 1927, in Mill Valley, California. He received his Bachelor’s (1951) and
Master’s (1953) degrees in biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD (1960) from
Stanford University as a student of the venerable killifish expert, George Sprague Myers. Stan began his long
and distinguished career as a Curator in the Division of Fishes, National Museum of Natural History, in 1962.
That year he moved from California with his wife Marilyn and their two children, Anna, now of Potomac,
MD, and Earl, of Arizona. Stan and Marilyn were best friends and life partners. They lived, worked, and travelled
together throughout 69 years of marriage (figure 1). An engaging review of their life together was published
by Fish Division colleague David G. Smith (Copeia, 2007(4), pp. 1030–1045).
Stan’s PhD dissertation included a detailed, well-illustrated study of the skeleton of Brycon meeki, a
representative characiform fish, which set the professional standard for fish osteology. Stan’s extraordinary
skills as an artist were revealed in his meticulous illustrations and photographs. His outstanding research was
recognized by his peers: he received the Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award for Excellence in Systematic
Ichthyology for an outstanding body of published work in systematic ichthyology from the American Society
of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in 1991, and was honored at an international symposium on neotropical
fishes in Brazil with an award for his “Invaluable Contributions to Neotropical Ichthyology” in 1997.
Stan officially retired from his Smithsonian position as in 2007 but still maintained an office/lab space
in the Division of Fishes while he continued his research and regular interactions with other staff and visitors,
especially students and professionals from South America and his many friends and colleagues in the aquarium
hobby and trade. He was a regular speaker at
local aquarium society meetings. Stan loved to display
and otherwise share his illustrations and photographs
of aquarium fishes. Many a visitor would
leave not just with a story or two about the discovery
of a new species or a new morphological character,
but with an even more valuable memento: a colorful
fish photograph autographed by Stan.
Lynne R. Parenti
Division of Fishes
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C. 20560
Email: parentil@si.edu
Figure 1: Stan and Marilyn Weitzman next to the
fish tanks they maintained in the Division of Fishes,
National Museum of Natural History, March 2007.
Photo copyright Sandra J. Raredon, Smithsonian
Institution.
