Kir Nazimovich Nesis (9 January 1934 – 8 January 2003) was a Russian marine biologist and malacologist, specialising in cephalopods.
Early life and education
Nesis was born in Moscow on 9 January 1934 to an intellectual family, his father was an architect and his mother was an economic geographer. His father was arrested by the Soviet state in 1938 and executed. This would cause some difficulty for Nesis as he was the son of a person who had been executed as an enemy of the state. He initially wanted to study astronomy and he won an All-Union Competition in astronomy for schoolchildren but this career was not open to the son of an "enemy of the nation". He decided instead to become a marine biologist and in 1951 he enrolled in a course at the Moscow Technical Institute for Fisheries and Fishery Management in the Department of Hydrobiology, as this was not among the top ranked Soviet institutions his father's status did not bar him from entry.
Career
After graduation Nesis was secured an appointment as a Junior Researcher at the Laboratory of Marine Biology in the Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography in Murmansk. His first spell at the Laboratory lasted from 1956 to 1960 and he returned from 1963-1966. He eventually became the Chief of the Laboratory and carried our research on the benthic fauna of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, especially the taxonomy and ecology of various groups of these animals. Between these tow periods in Murmansk Nesis enrolled at the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Here he completed his Ph.D. and his thesis was called “The Bottom Fauna of Commercial Fishery Areas of the North Atlantic and the Atlantic sector of the Arctic as an Indicator of Productivity and Water Regime”.
In 1966 he returned to Moscow where h briefly held a position with the Scientific Council on Hydrobiology and Ichthyology before moving to the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Nesis worked here for the rest of his life in the Department of Nekton first as the Senior Scientist, then as the Principal Scientist and finally as the Leading Scientist. From the mid-1960s, the main focus of his research was on the taxonomy, zoogeography, ecology and evolution of cephalopods. In 1986, he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree for his book “Oceanic Cephalopods: Distribution, Ecology, and Evolution”.
Nesis had come to be regarded as one of the world's foremost cephalopod workers by the mid 1970s and he was very prolific publishing around 460 scientific and popular publications and reviews, these included 6 books and 225 scientific papers on benthic ecology, cephalopod biology, marine zoogeography, ecology and evolutionary theory. He was the author of 43 papers about the ecology of bottom fauna. From this body of work some 274 publications, including all six of his books, 142 scientific papers and 45 popular science articles, were about cephalopods. He described 29 new cephalopod taxa, which included one new family. Nesis was also a productive free-lance author, writing circa 125 popular articles on biology for Soviet and Russian popular scientific publications. As well as that, he was the leading writer of biology abstracts for the Soviet/Russian Abstracts magazine of the Institute of Scientific Information writing at least 30,500 abstracts, averaging 70 a month. He also was Editor-in-Chief of Ruthenica, the Russian Malacological Journal that he helped found and he sat on the editorial boards of several other scientific journals.