Richard Lawrence Pyle, Ph.D. (born 24 March 1967) is a
scuba diver
Scuba diving is a mode of underwater diving whereby divers use breathing equipment that is completely independent of a surface air supply. The name "scuba", an acronym for "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus", was coined by Chris ...
and
ichthyologist
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish ( Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of Octobe ...
working on Hawaii.
Pyle discovered the principle of "
Pyle stop
A Pyle stop is a type of short, optional deep decompression stop performed by scuba divers at depths well below the first decompression stop mandated by a conventional dissolved phase decompression algorithm, such as the US Navy or Bühlmann deco ...
s" when
decompressing from many deep dives in search of new species of fish, and has identified hundreds of new species.
He is the author of over 130 publications.
In October 2015, he won second prize, an award of €5,000, in the GBIF
Ebbe Nielsen Challenge
The Ebbe Nielsen Challenge is an international science competition conducted annually from 2015 onwards by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), with a set of cash prizes that recognize researcher(s)' submissions in creating software ...
, a
Global Biodiversity Information Facility
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around the ...
competition, for BioGUID.org, "a web service that crosslinks identifiers linked to data objects in the biodiversity realm".
At that time, the site contained over one billion (1,000,000,000) identifiers.
He has been honoured by having the twilight fangblenny (''
Petroscirtes pylei
''Petroscirtes pylei'', the twilight fangblenny, is a species of combtooth blenny found in the western central Pacific ocean, around Fiji. This species reaches a length of SL. The specific name honours the American ichthyologist Richard L ...
'') named in his honor.
Pyle is a member of
ZooBank
ZooBank is an open access website intended to be the official International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) registry of zoological nomenclature. Any nomenclatural acts (e.g. publications that create or change a taxonomic name) need ...
Committee and the leader of ZooBank architecture policy working group.
"ZooBank Committee"
accessed 6 November 2017.
See also
* :Taxa named by Richard Pyle
References
External links
*
BioGUID
Ichthyologists
Living people
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumni
1967 births
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