William Orville Ayres
William Orville Ayres (* September 11, 1817, † April 30, 1887 ) was an American physician and ichthyologist.
Life and work
William Orville Ayres was born in 1817 in Connecticut. He studied medicine at Yale University and a PhD on tetanus. Early on, however, he began to take an interest in the natural sciences and has focused particularly on the ornithology. He worked closely with his friend John James La Forest Audubon together, after Audubon's death in 1844, Ayres turned on the grounds that the ornithology had been completed and there is nothing more to explore from this area and worked from then on in the Ichthyology.
In 1854 Ayres moved to the California Academy of Sciences and became the first curator of ichthyology. The working conditions were very bad at the time, Ayres was not a suitable lighting available and he had to publish in the absence of scientific journals its first descriptions in newspapers.
Ayres worked mainly on spike heads ( Sebastinae ) and described many species of the genus Sebastes. At the same time Theodore Nicholas Gill worked at the Smithsonian Institution in the same genus. Gill had serious doubts about the work of Ayres and criticized him repeatedly, he finally published in 1864 a work in which he criticized Ayres work hard as a whole.
The ruthless criticism Gills met Ayres so hard that he refused henceforth yet to publish or do research to Ichthyology. He left San Francisco in 1871 and first moved to Chicago. There he ran into financial difficulties and left the city in 1878 to New Haven. Where he taught medicine at Yale University. On April 30, 1887 William Orville Ayres died.
Ayres in honor of various fish and bird species have been named ayresii with the Artepipheton.