Paul Percy Viosca Jr. was born in New Orleans on June 24, 1892, the second of eight children of lawyer Paul Percy Sr. and Wilhelmina Adrienne Viosca.  His interest in fish and aquatic life began early. He and older brother René knitted their own nets and seined for shrimp, crabs and fish along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain some miles from their home on what was then the swampy eastern fringe of the city in order to earn money for their education. After their early morning fishing was over they took their catches to the French Market, a daily bicycle round trip of over 30 miles even before they started that day’s college classes.

Viosca attended Tulane University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1913 and a Master of Science degree in 1915, although, as he was later fond of saying, he received his highest degree from the ‘university of hard knocks’ – the wilds and waters of Orleans and St. Tammany Parishes. He taught at Tulane as a student assistant and an instructor before leaving in 1916 to set up the Southern Biological Supply Company, which supplied specimens of crawfish and other aquatic life for research and commercial use, as well as advising industry. While he remained president of his company and headed its research department, Viosca also became one of the country’s first free-lance biologists. He married Corinne Rousette Staigg in 1918, and they had two children.

Dr. Edward Chin, the former Director of the Sea Grant Program at the University of Georgia, described Viosca as “a gentle bear” who was always ready to share his knowledge about nature’s wonders. One incident sums this up very well. In 1948 a visiting Dutch biologist expressed the wish to see a Louisiana alligator. Rather than taking him to the zoo, Viosca took him out to the Honey Island swamps to look for alligators in their native habitat. After waiting for several hours, they finally saw a five-foot specimen. “I was so glad”, Viosca said later, “that I jumped out of the boat, landed on his back and caught him between the shoulders with both hands so he couldn’t bite me.”

Viosca was definitely a “Man for All Seasons”. His sense of humor is evident in the titles of some of his scientific papers, such as “Perambulating Millipeds” (1925) and “Call the Police” (1957). He participated in crawfish eating contests in the French Market, although on winning one such contest his competitors claimed he had eaten the crawfish shell and all. He also chose and trained the winner of the First Annual Governor’s Cup Race, at the national crab derby held in Maryland in August 1960. A sand crab from Grand Terre Island called Lou’s Gumbo beat entries from Virginia and Delaware.

With his death from cancer on August 27, 1961, Louisiana lost its pre-eminent naturalist. Viosca’s publications did, however, make available to posterity all of the knowledge his continuous scientific observations had collected. He was fascinated by the migration of the monarch butterfly but his data on this phenomenon was never published fully. As fellow botanist and Tulane professor Joseph A. Ewan relates, even as Viosca was dying he refused to believe his life’s work had come to an end. “When I have so much knowledge of the fauna and flora,” he told Ewan, “why should this cancer snuff out my life?” For over four decades Percy Viosca practiced what he preached, gaining recognition outside Louisiana even as his own state was reluctant to accept his advice. But by the end of his life, his remarkable contribution was finally acknowledged earning him the title “Mr. Marine Biologist, the dean of Louisiana biologists”.