Seventy years ago, University of Minnesota graduate student Raymond Lindeman began studying the diversity of life in the mud of Cedar Bog Lake and formulating his theories about ecosystems. Today Lindeman is credited with laying the foundation for modern eocolgy, though he wouldn't live long enough to learn the impact his work has had.

On a stormy afternoon this past June, the University of Minnesota dedicated a new building at its Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in the name of alumnus Raymond Laurel Lindeman (Ph.D. ’41). Lindeman’s pre–World War II work at the reserve, located an hour north of the Twin Cities, has become a legendary component of ecological lore. In fact, many regard Lindeman’s study at a teardrop-shaped lake on the reserve as the seminal research of modern ecology. Like Aldo Leopold’s cabin in Sand County of central Wisconsin, scientists and other aficionados of that work make pilgrimages to the pond where Lindeman, with the help of his wife, Eleanor, first began studying the functions of its ecosystem.

University professor and world-renowned ecologist David Tilman, director of Cedar Creek, says that Lindeman’s efforts produced a clear demarcation in the science of ecology. “Before him, ecologists would describe an ecosystem by talking about the plants and animals that lived there and what they looked like,” Tilman explains. At Cedar Bog Lake, Lindeman “showed how all the organisms interacted with each other.”

Lindeman’s research pushed ecology from “an observational science to a modeling science,” says Bob Elde (Ph.D. ’74), dean of the U’s College of Biological Sciences. And Cedar Bog Lake “is ground zero of that work.”
Others in the world of scientific ecology likewise offer hosannas. The American Society of Limnology and Oceanography gives an annual award in Lindeman’s name. Many other renowned ecologists at the College of Biological Sciences, including Peter Reich and Sarah Hobbie, sing the praises of Lindeman’s work. And, of course, the intrepid group that traveled to the Cedar Creek reserve despite a sky on the brink of hurtling hailstones onto the roof of the new Raymond Lindeman Research and Discovery Center, has come to pay homage to the man for whom it is named.

All this for someone whose work ended before his 28th birthday, who wrote all of six scientific papers in his career, and who published just one major article in his lifetime.

A single photo of Ray Lindeman gets hauled out whenever his story is told. It’s the only one that the University has in its archives. Wavy-haired and studious-looking in his wire-rimmed glasses, Lindeman has an undeniable air of mid-20th-century

Raymond Lindeman’s research laid the foundation for modern ecology. He is pictured here at about age 24 in 1939, a couple years before his death. All photographs courtesy of University Archives.

geek about him. Odds are good that somewhere in the pockets of his sports coat are a protractor, slide rule, and a pen oozing ink.

A farm boy born in 1915 near Redwood Falls, Minnesota, Raymond was one of four children raised by Otto and Julia Lindeman. Raymond was 7 years old when he went to the family medicine cabinet for some iodine to mend a scrape. The bottle felt empty, so the boy tipped it above his right eye to see if anything was left within. Iodine poured out into his eye, causing devastating damage to the cornea. For the rest of his life, Lindeman could tell night from day with his right eye but not much else.

He went to Redwood Falls High School where he won applause from teachers and classmates for his rhetorical abilities. His senior essay on “Americanism” won an American Legion Auxiliary contest and was published on the front page of the local paper shortly after his graduation. Not only does Lindeman’s essay hint at his future inclination toward leftist politics, its “one world” sentiments betray a kind of political corollary to his ecological thinking. He chides his fellow Americans for “pushing America forward without thinking of other nations and people. . . . The world has progressed far in the last few years and the modes of travel and communication have brought the people of the world close together. As we bring the countries in contact with each other, we find that unless these countries and people co-operated they cannot stand. This has been proved time and time again in the past.”

From Redwood Falls, Lindeman went to Parkville, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City, where he attended Park College (now Park University), a small liberal arts school cofounded by and named for Colonel George Park, who gained renown in the years before the Civil War when pro-slavery Missourians tossed his abolitionist newspaper’s printing press into the Missouri River. At Park, Lindeman met his future wife, Eleanor Hall, the daughter of a professor of political science at Albion College in Michigan.

Lindeman finished second in his class at Park and headed to the University of Minnesota in the late 1930s where he began graduate school in the Department of Zoology. His labmate, Charles Reif (B.S. ’35, M.A. ’38, Ph.D. ’41), would later become chair of the Department of Biology at Wilkes College in Pennsylvania and write a reminiscence of Lindeman that is the source of much of what we know about his character and idiosyncrasies.

Lindeman lived close to the vest in a trailer near campus, surviving on his annual teaching assistant’s salary of $600. Reif and Lindeman cooked their lunches together on a lab Bunsen burner. They argued over

An hour north of the University’s Twin Cities campus, the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve is like a mini-Minnesota, with elements of prairie, oak savanna, spruce bog, and hardwood and cedar forest—all within its nine square miles.

Herbert Hoover, with Lindeman proclaiming that he could never respect “a president who called out the army against American citizens.” Lindeman had the simple tastes of a country kid. When Reif took him home for a family dinner, Reif’s mother, who was something of a gourmand, asked Lindeman what he’d liked to eat. Salmon cakes, was his reply, so out came the canned salmon and salmon cakes it was.

Lindeman was more of a brilliant student than a diligent one and tended to skip classes in favor of pursuing his own work. According to Reif, Lindeman had the disturbing need to walk to the inside of Reif whenever the pair crossed the Washington Street Bridge because Lindeman “feared he might have a sudden impulse to throw himself over.”

Another classmate, Lloyd Smith, says in Reif’s memoir that Lindeman had “strongheaded tendencies that would not have been tolerated had his obvious talent not been manifest.” Smith adds that “[Lindeman] was somewhat reluctant to take the experience of those of us who were more senior in the department  and preferred to find out everything on his own. This occasionally led to minor disasters, especially in the technical sense, but perhaps this kind of approach was necessary in a mind that was able to produce the innovations that he presented.”

Eleanor moved to Minneapolis when she was 19 and continued her education at the University of Minnesota. She and Ray married in the summer of 1938, and Eleanor soon began assisting her husband in the Ph.D. thesis project that would make his name and legacy. They would borrow Reif’s Model A Ford, drive up Highway 65 to Cedar Lake Bog, fill large tubs with bottom fauna from the lake, and haul it all back to the lab on campus for the laborious task of counting the various life forms within the muck.

The work was not made easier by Lindeman’s health; as it turned out, he had a congenital liver problem that prompted periodic hepatic attacks. According to Reif, Ray “turned a bright yellow” during his first illness in Minneapolis and wound up in the University Hospital. Reif and other labmates were able to help Lindeman continue his collection of data from Cedar Lake Bog while he was laid up, but given his other difficulty—the blinded eye—he needed ongoing assistance for all the dredging and hauling and microscopic examinations involved in his research. Through the last years of his study, Eleanor was his indispensable assistant. 

Lindeman’s thesis plan was to conduct a quantitative assessment of the biological components of a senescent lake—one that was transitioning from a body of water to a bog. Through his arduous, painstaking research—trying to quantify the movement

To a student of ecology, the place where Lindeman conducted his research is like Sutter’s Creek to a gold miner.

and interrelationships of nutrients from one trophic level to the next—he was essentially creating the “modeling” experiment that would be lauded by ecologists like Tilman 70 years hence.

Before Lindeman began his work a great deal of ecological data and observation already existed, but the distance between “eco” and “system” was a far piece. By breaking down the various elements of Cedar Bog Lake to describe its basic flow of energy, Lindeman illustrated a means for future scientists to do the same in any ecosystem, large or small. By extension, the effects of disruptions or changes on a system could be studied as well, allowing for dynamic descriptions of ongoing changes. Lindeman’s work went beyond the traditional ecological studies of the day, which typically sought to identify and place various plants and animals within certain communities. Instead, he suggested a scientific means for viewing the dynamic interconnectedness of all that plant and animal life.  

To a student of ecology, the place where Ray Lindeman did his research is like Sutter’s Creek to a gold miner. Cedar Creek mixes elements of prairie, oak savanna, spruce bog, hardwood, and cedar forest all within commuting distance of the University’s Twin Cities campus. In an ecological sense, the reserve is a mini-Minnesota, combining most of the state’s diverse ecological systems within its nine square miles in northeast Anoka County.

First identified by William Cooper of the U’s Department of Botany as he was flying over the ground in 1930, Cedar Bog Lake and the surrounding land constituted a perfect laboratory for University ecologists to study a variety of landscapes. It took a few years for a group of Minnesota scientists—joined together as the Minnesota Academy of Science—to raise money to begin the purchase of property, but they did, and eventually the deed and management of what was originally called the Cedar Creek Natural History Area would pass to the University of Minnesota.

Lindeman and a number of other U of M students had already begun using the property for their studies before it was bought. Ever since, the reserve has been continually expanding, thereby preserving and enhancing its ecological functions for studies like his. Aside from its expanded size, the addition of several laboratory buildings, and now the new center that bears his name, the reserve today looks pretty much as it did in Lindeman’s time.

The famous pond from which Ray and Eleanor hauled their samples is about a 10-minute walk from the new building. Long sleeves, pants, and a healthy dousing of DEET are recommended to pilgrims. A well-used path of wood planks leads through

Those who look at Minnesota lakes wth an eye for a place to build the cabin and dock the boat may not be impressed with boggy lake where Lindeman conducted his research.

boggy woods to the water itself. Those who look at Minnesota lakes with an eye for a place to build the cabin and dock the boat will be less than impressed. But naturalists like Lindeman, interested in the properties of muck, will immediately understand how beautiful it must have looked to him. Cattails and swamp grass creep in toward the heart of a small and shallow pond, making anything that could be called a shoreline a fluid entity. There is no solid ground and footsteps ooze in the same primordial slurry that Lindeman recognized as an energy factory. 

 Lindeman received his Ph.D. in zoology from the U in March 1941. The next month, he learned that he’d won a prestigious fellowship to work with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, one of the nation’s leading limnologists, at Yale University. When he arrived in New Haven that fall with Eleanor, Lindeman was already in the process of fine-tuning the last chapter of his thesis for submission to the prestigious journal Ecology. With Hutchinson’s comments and advice, Lindeman sent off his paper, only to have it rejected. The referees of the paper felt that Lindeman’s reach had exceeded his grasp. The technical aspects of his study did not provide sufficient support for the theoretical claims he was making. “Chances are,” wrote one of the judges, “that the author’s beliefs and imaginary lakes would be very different entities if he had a background of observations on fifty or a hundred of the 10,000 lakes claimed by the state of Minnesota instead of only one, and that a special type.”

Hutchinson provided more assistance to Lindeman, writing a letter of support for his post-graduate student’s ideas. The editor of Ecology, Thomas Park, was also taken with the brilliance of Lindeman’s basic assumptions and asked him to resubmit his paper with changes. Lindeman sent a reworked version of his essay to Ecology after Christmas 1941, and Park agreed to publish the paper in the summer of 1942.

Raymond Lindeman didn’t live to see his work in print. His bouts with hepatitis worsened during the spring and eventually evolved into cirrhosis. An operation at Yale Hospital in mid-June failed to save him, and he died at the age of 27 on June 29, 1942, with Eleanor and his mother, Julia, at his side.

Lindeman’s work lives on, however, as does that pond at Cedar Creek. Both remain a part of the great energy flow.  

Tim Brady is a St. Paul–based writer and frequent contributor to Minnesota. For more information about Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, go to www.cedarcreek.umn.edu.