Paul Humann, best known as the co-founder of New World Publications – which printed the internationally renowned Reef Fish Identificaton series of books – and the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, has died at the age of 86 at his home in Davie, Florida. A statement released by New World Publications said he passed away peacefully, surrounded by friends and family.
Humann grew up in Wichita, Kansas, graduating from Wichita High School North in 1956, and Wichita State University with a degree in biology in 1960. He went on to study law at Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, where he received his Juris Doctor degree in 1964, after which he practised law in Wichita for seven years, becoming a partner in the third-largest law firm in the state at the time.
Humann learned to dive and took his first underwater photographs in the early while still at law school, and by the end of the decade, a number of his fish portraits had been published in Skin Diver Magazine’s ‘Fish of the Month’ series. He later joined the ranks of the Underwater Society of America, becoming its Vice-President of Photography and organising the first national underwater photo contest for its members.
His hobby became a way of life in 1971, when Humann left his successful law practice to become the captain and owner of the M/V Cayman Diver, the Caribbean’s first scuba diving liveaboard. As a result, he was instrumental in developing the region’s recreational diving industry; scouting potential reef sites from the air for his guests and establishing Little Cayman’s famous west side drop-offs and reefs as major Caribbean scuba diving destinations.
Diving daily for the next eight years gave Humann the opportunity to photograph, document and study the biological diversity of the Caribbean’s coral reefs, setting the stage for what was to become the first comprehensive set of marine life identification books for divers, and paving the way for a move to South Florida in 1980 to pursue his publishing career.
Throughout the years, his marine life and travel images have appeared in numerous magazines including National Geographic, Audubon, Natural History,
National Wildlife, as well as specialist dive publications such as Ocean Realm. He independently published four marine life books before joining forces with Ned DeLoach, founder of New World Publications, as co-editor of Ocean Realm magazine, in 1988.
Finding that they worked well together, the pair established a long-standing partnership and subsequently self-published a series of marine life and scuba diving-related books, beginning with the popular Reef Fish Identification, Reef Creature Identification and Reef Coral Identification – Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas.
The second edition of Reef Fish Identification received the publishing industry’s Benjamin Franklin Award, voted the best reference book of 1994. Together the pair authored, photographed, and published a total 14 marine-related books for underwater naturalists.
Humann’s groundwork for the field guides ultimately established visual identification criteria for a huge number of marine species, making it practical for both underwater naturalists and marine scientists to assess the biodiversity of reef ecosystems. He collaborated closely with marine taxonomists and, as pictures are often required for positive species identification, many of Humann’s photographs were the first to ever be published of living species in their natural habitat. The specimens from this work now reside in the Smithsonian’s National History Museum collections.
Through his ongoing contributions to science, several previously undocumented species have been named in his honour, including the ornate cup coral, Coenocyathus humanni, from the Tropical Western Atlantic; Ophichthus humanni, an eel inhabiting the Western Pacific, and a beautiful fairy wrasse, Cirrhilabrus humanni, from Indonesia.
During the 1980s Humann led numerous diving tours through See & Sea Travel. Most popular were his frequent excursions to the Galápagos
Islands where he pioneered diving in the now famous hammerhead-shark-laden waters of Darwin and Wolf Islands. In the following decades, he privately led annual fish-watching expeditions to tropical seas around the equator.
Humann and DeLoach’s concern for the welfare of the marine environment led to their founding of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (www.REEF.org) in 1990. Based in Key Largo, Florida, REEF’s mission is to protect biodiversity and ocean life by actively engaging and inspiring the public through citizen science, education, and partnership with the scientific community. Its cadre of trained volunteer recreational divers and snorkellers has compiled the largest fish-sighting database in the world, comprised of nearly 300,000 surveys as of 2024.
REEF is also widely acclaimed for the Grouper Moon Project, a two-decades-long collaboration with the Cayman Islands Department of Environment for studying, monitoring, and safeguarding one of the last remaining annual spawning aggregations of the Caribbean’s iconic Nassau grouper. The conservation organization has also been at the forefront of monitoring and assessing the impact of the invasive red lionfish, which has rapidly spread throughout the Tropical Western Atlantic.
Humman continued his volunteer work with REEF, acting as chairman of REEF’s Board of Trustees until 2021 when he became the organization’s first Trustee Emeritus. In recognition of their authoritative guidebooks and the founding of REEF, the publishing partners received the US Coral Reef Task Force’s Outstanding Public Awareness and Education Award in 2006.
Paul Humann’s other notable tributes and honours include being named a 2006 recipient of The Diving Equipment and Marketing Association’s Reaching Out Award, induction in 2007 into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame, and in 2010 he was the recipient of the NOGI award from the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences, for his efforts to preserve the underwater world.
The family has asked that those wishing to honour Paul Humann’s memory may direct their donations to the Reef Environmental Education Foundation.
