Carl Chun

Carl Chun (Karl Friedrich Gustav Chun, 1 October 1852 to 11 April 1914) was a German marine biologist who worked as a professor at the Universities of Königsberg (1883), Breslau (1891) and Leipzig (1898) and was a pioneer of German oceanographic research. Born in Höchst, now part of Frankfurt, he became interested in zoology through the Senckenberg Museum, studied at the Universities of Göttingen and Leipzig and received his doctorate in 1874. He was privat-docent of zoology and assistant to Rudolf Leuckart from 1878 to 1883, worked at the Naples Zoological Station under Anton Dohrn, where he published a monograph on comb jellyfish, and was among the first to study and describe siphonophores. In 1887 he had the Naples engineer Peterson design the trap now known as the Peterson Closing Net for sampling at set depths. He organized and led the first German deep-sea expedition aboard the SS Valdivia in 1898 and 1899, spent much of his life studying its collections, and discovered many marine organisms, including the vampire squid. In 1888 he described seasonal vertical migration of oceanic organisms, and he was a specialist on cephalopods and plankton.