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Maude Jane Delap
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Maude Jane Delap was born in 1866, in Templecrone Rectory, Co. Donegal. In 1874, when she was 8 eight years old, her family arrived by boat onto Valentia Island, a small island off the south west coast of Ireland. With no schools in Valentia, Maude and her sisters had no formal education but were taught by their father Rev. Alexander Delap. Rev. Delap a keen amateur naturalist introduced his children to the delights of natural history at an early age. Maude and her sister Constance were very interested in the various animal life in the seas around Valentia which is greatly influenced by the effects of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.
With her sisters, she ran a small hospital on the Island but they also found time to continue their collecting and research on marine animals, especially plankton. Several leading marine biologists received much assistance from the Delap sisters. Maude showed a special flair for plankton collecting and she discovered a number of rare and new species of jellyfish and other minute sea animals in her net samples.
She went on to become a prominent marine biologist and an expert on the jellyfish.Every day she took off in a boat (wearing bodice, long skirts and straw hat) and scoured the cold waters around her remote island home for jellyfish. She eventually learnt how to breed and rear them in belljars. Jellyfish are notoriously difficult to keep in captivity but Maude had a huge passion for these creatures and proved very skillful at keeping them alive.
Letters from Maude kept by the Natural History Museum in Dublin give vivid details of the specimens she sent to the museum by train.
Local children and fishermen knew to bring her any strange sea life they had found. Once the Museum politely declined a huge beached whale that had washed up on the shore, saying that it could only use its bones if they were cleaned and dry. Maude promptly dug up her asparagus patch in order to bury the whale and would periodically dig it up to check whether or not it was ready for dispatch.
Her work led to an offer of a career at the famous Marine Biological Station at Plymouth, England - but Maude preferred to continue her work on Valentia Island. She chose to stay.....
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