Oscar Elton Sette (March 29, 1900 - July 25, 1972), who preferred to be called Elton Sette,Kendall, Arthur W., Jr., and Gary J. Duker, "The development of recruitment fisheries oceanography in the United States," Fisheries Oceanography 7:2, pp. 69-88, 1998. was an influential 20th-century American fisheries scientist. During a five-decade career with the United States Bureau of Fisheries, United States Fish and Wildlife Service and its Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, Sette pioneered the integration of fisheries science with the sciences of oceanography and meteorology to develop a complete understanding of the physical and biological characteristics of the ocean environment and the effects of those characteristics on fisheries and fluctuations in the abundance of fish. He is recognized both in the United States and internationally for many significant contributions he made to marine fisheries research and for his leadership in the maturation of fisheries science to encompass fisheries oceanography, defined as the "appraisal or exploitation of any kind of [marine] organism useful to Man" and "the study of oceanic processes affecting the abundance and availability of commercial fishes." Many fisheries scientists consider him to be the "father of modern fisheries science."
Biography
Early life Oscar Elton Sette was born in Clyman, Wisconsin, on 29 July 1900, the fourth child and second son of Martin and Louise Sette. After a few years the family moved to Juneau, Wisconsin, and in 1910 to a lemon ranch in Chula Vista, California. As a child, Sette developed an early interest in nature and living things and became an avid butterfly collector, which became a lifelong hobby.
Sette attended National City High School in National City, California. After graduation in 1917, he began studies at San Diego Junior College, planning to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1918 to study entomology. By chance, however, he met his high school chemistry teacher, Elmer Higgins, on a San Diego street in 1918. Higgins was working as a scientific assistant at the California State Fisheries Laboratory in San Pedro, and he invited Sette to accompany him on an exploratory trawling trip in a fishing boat. Sette immediately was fascinated with the variety of sea creatures caught in the fishing trawler's nets and decided to pursue a career as a fisheries scientist. The California State Fisheries Laboratory soon hired him to check canneries for albacore landings, beginning his career in fisheries science at the age of 18.
California State Fisheries Laboratory, 1919-1924 Sette scrapped his plans to attend the University of California, instead entering service in the United States Army in 1918 during the late stages of World War I. After his discharge in 1919, he became part of the staff of the California State Fisheries Laboratory. Sardines had become increasingly important commercially in the United States, and in 1920 he received his first major assignment for the laboratory, which was to study the sardine fishery off California to assist the laboratory in improving its understanding of the life cycle and behavior of sardines and to determine the effect of fishing on sardine stocks. Based in Monterey, California, Sette found the fluctuation of sardine populations from year to year to be of particular interest. Based on his work at Monterey, he wrote his first article on fisheries, discussing the Monterey fishery, his work there, and the need to better understand changes in the abundance and size of fish in order to manage fish stocks properly; the article was published in California Fish and Game in 1920 with the title "The Sardine Problem in the Monterey Bay District." The interest in the reasons for fluctuations in fish size and populations stayed with him for the rest of his life and played a major role in his career.
On September 1, 1920, Sette took a leave of absence to attend Stanford University, and finish college. Stanford was a major center for the study of fisheries on the United States West Coast, and while there, he studied under the noted ichthyologist and educator David Starr Jordan (1851–1931). Graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Zoology in June 1922, he returned to the California State Fisheries Laboratory, working in Monterey during the sardine fishing season and for the rest of the year at the San Pedro Laboratory, where he conducted research related to the tuna fishery. His first academic paper on fisheries – providing statistics on the sardine fishery and describing sampling systems he used at Monterey – resulted from this work, and it was accepted for publication in April 1924.
Bureau of Fisheries, 1924-1928
Impressed by Sette's use of statistics in studying the sardine fishery at Monterey, United States Commissioner of Fisheries Henry O'Malley hired Sette in 1924 to work at the headquarters of the United States Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, D.C., as Chief of the Division of Fishery Industries. Beginning work in his new position on January 8, 1924, Sette supervised the bureau's research in fishery technology, particularly the canning and preservation of fishery products, as well the distribution of technological and production information on fisheries to the public. He also was responsible for a special effort to improve the United States Government′s system of collecting and publishing fisheries statistics. He wrote annual statistical arid economic reports of United States fisheries and articles concerning commercial fisheries for bureau publications and trade journals.
In addition to his administrative and supervisory responsibilities in Washington, Sette remained active in fisheries biology, particularly as it related to his interest in fluctuations in the abundance of fish stocks. As early as 1911, the Bureau of Fisheries had expressed interest in working as part of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) to determine the reasons for fluctuations in the annual catch of Atlantic mackerel in the Atlantic Ocean, but the United States had withdrawn from the ICES in 1916 after making little progress. Having himself noted highly variable annual Atlantic mackerel catches, Sette began an investigation of the Atlantic mackerel on his own initiative. His former chemistry teacher Elmer Higgins, now also at the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington as Chief of the Division of Scientific Inquiry, noted his work on the Atlantic mackerel and offered him a position as a full-time fisheries investigator in his division, which Sette accepted in 1928.
North Atlantic Fishery Investigation, 1928-1937 At the same time that Sette took up his new duties in Higgins' division, the Bureau of Fisheries was establishing regional research teams, or "investigations," to investigate fisheries around the United States, and Sette became the chief of one of them, the North Atlantic Fishery Investigations. Sette set up the headquarters of the new investigations office at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Under his guidance, the Bureau of Fisheries' understanding of Atlantic Ocean fisheries off the United States East Coast increased substantially. Each summer, Sette also served as director of the Bureau's Fisheries Station at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Sette himself conducted research of the Atlantic mackerel fishery aboard the Bureau of Fisheries research ship Albatross II from 1926 until 1932. After a preliminary cruise in 1926, his research aboard Albatross II began in earnest in 1927, focusing on the effects of changes in ecological conditions on Atlantic mackerel eggs and larvae. Before his research ended abruptly in June 1932, when the aging ship became uneconomical to operate and was decommissioned, he concluded that mortality rates among Atlantic mackerel larvae changed from year to year according to variations in drift based on winds and not, as had earlier been proposed, based on changes in mortality at the critical period when larvae switched over from their yolk sacs to exogenous food sources. Sette's study pioneered the computation of population estimates of larval fish growth and mortality rates.
In addition to his official duties, Sette pursued postgraduate studies and received a Master of Arts in Biology from Harvard University in 1930.
California fisheries, 1937-1949
Meanwhile, in the Pacific Ocean fishery off the U.S. West Coast, a "sardine crisis" was looming. From 1916 through 1939, the annual sardine catch had more than doubled every six years, and had reached an annual high of about 1,500,000,000 pounds (680,000,000 kg) in 1936. Although California state biologists had warned against overfishing, the California state government had been unable to regulate sardine fishing through legislation. Amid rising concerns about the food supply in the United States, the Bureau of Fisheries sent Sette – who had demonstrated his ability to manage fisheries and had experience in the California sardine fishery and good contacts in the California fishing industry – to California in 1937 under a Congressional mandate to conduct sardine research that would allow better management of the Pacific sardine fishery. Sette became director of the bureau's new South Pacific Fisheries Investigations and established the organization's headquarters on the campus of Stanford University with instructions to "direct and perform research on the nature and causes of fluctuations in pelagic fish populations." Sette quickly developed a plan for the study of the life cycle of the sardine in relation to the fishery; his plan included ecological studies of all stages of the life history of sardines as well as studies of the impact of fishing that contrasted sharply with the more narrowly focused fisheries research approach that preceded them. He enlisted the assistance of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, thereby ensuring that ecological factors would be part of the findings in his sardine investigations.
Sette at first encountered hostility and resistance in California, where the Chief of the State Bureau of Marine Fisheries, N.B. Schofield, who resented federal intervention in California fisheries investigations, openly urged Sette to abandon his mission and return to Washington. The local fishing industry also viewed federal involvement in its activities with suspicion and preferred no federal intervention in California fisheries. Sette, however, overcame the hostility and opposition through tact and diplomacy, and his previous work in fisheries science and honesty in his dealings won over those who opposed him.