Vic Kennedy

Faculty

Vic Kennedy

Professor Emeritus
Faculty
Vic Kennedy
Professor Emeritus
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory

Bio

Dr. Kennedy is a Professor Emeritus at Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. For 38 years, he performed ecological research in Chesapeake Bay and taught graduate students at Horn Point Laboratory before joining CBL. He has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals on invertebrate and fish biology.

He has also been involved with editing nine books and writing another. The three books on the left (below) contain the peer-reviewed scientific papers presented at three international biennial meetings of the Estuarine Research Federation. The next four volumes contain comprehensive reviews of the biology, ecology, fisheries, and management of eastern oysters, blue crabs, diamond-backed terrapins, and soft-shell clams by experts in those topics. There follows a book on designing and building experimental ecosystems (from fish tanks to ponds) to enable study of the effects of scales of space, time, and complexity on such mesocosms, and a compendium of papers dealing with such scaling relationships.

Dr. Kennedy also studies environmental histories so as to appreciate how resource-rich Chesapeake Bay was when Europeans arrived and how it has been over-exploited since the 19th Century. To that end, he has written Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018, to describe his findings  https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/shifting-baselines-chesapeake-bay.

Books edited, co-edited, and written

Areas of Expertise

  • Environmental histories of fisheries and ecology.
  • Global climate change.
  • Reproduction and larval behavior and ecology of bivalves.
  • Crab and fish foraging behavior.
  • Ecology of littoral and sublittoral benthic communities.

Education

  • 1962 B.Sc. Concordia University (formerly Sir George Williams University), Montreal, Canada. Zoology.
  • 1964 M.Sc. Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. Fisheries Biology.
  • 1970 Ph.D. University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, U.S.A. Ecology.