Tribute to Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain (Ranu)

February 6, 2023 John Bostock

Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain Ranu

We are shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden and untimely passing of Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain (Ranu) and extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends and colleagues at the Bangladesh Agricultural University. Ranu gained his PhD at the Institute of Aquaculture at the University of Stirling and continued a close cooperation with many staff in his work at BAU. Members share some of their memories and tributes here.

Professor Dave Little presents a tribute to Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain at an Institute of Aquaculture lunch-time seminar

He was deeply fascinated by fish and other aquatic organisms in their own right, and by aquatic ecology, and by the ways in which humans interact with and make use of fish. He was a natural transdisciplinarian, equally at home working on subjects such as the cryopreservation of fish sperm, microplastic contamination in aquatic ecosystems, research on breeding small indigenous fish, inquiring about the gendered implications of fish distribution within the household for human nutrition, or talking with traders and fish workers in their places of work about their life stories and livelihoods. He was kind, patient, energetic, endlessly inquisitive, wise, and deeply knowledgeable – a master of his craft, yet extremely modest. He will be deeply missed by all those whose life he touched.

Ben Belton

One of the fish sanctuaries set up by Ranu

‘We have lost a brother’ Developing and promoting fish sanctuaries in overexploited freshwater resources. Ranu was passionate about the fish fauna of Bangladesh and set-up a series of fish sanctuaries as a means of long-term surveillance, and critically, in encouraging recruitment within a branch of the Old Brahmaputra River that runs along the back of BAU, Mymensingh. During the period that the Institute worked closely with our colleagues at BAU to deliver the Distance Learning MSc course we would travel to Mymensingh twice a year. On one occasion as the Institute was being faced with staff redundancies and cut-backs Ranu and his colleagues led a support campaign including a rickshaw protest thousands of miles away in Bangladesh. Ranu’s passion as always was infectious and his role within the team of BAU tutors was critical. The University of Stirling slogan is ‘Be the difference’. In a life cut tragically short, Ranu really did make a difference to his profession, his community and Bangladesh as a whole.

David Little

Faculty and students at BAU protesting at staff cuts at the University of Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture in 2011

I worked with Ali Reza (as I knew him) during his PhD studies at Inst of Aquaculture Stirling. A young, talented and very friendly young man at the time. In the late 1990s he looked in more detail at a technique I had utilised in my own PhD, namely the use of small x-ray opaque spheres to estimate gastric evacuation in fish. This is a useful technique for aquaculture research that enables detailed understanding of stomach emptying, and hence the estimation of feeding frequency for fish farming. As feed is such a costly input for aquaculture, including in his home country of Bangladesh, this was an interesting area to investigate. He went on to study other aspects of the growth and survival of a promising aquaculture candidate at the time - a catfish that has since become an important culture species. This time looking into the effects of density, shelter, and light. He published two papers on this work in 1998, generously sharing the authorship with Malcolm Beveridge and myself. We met up several times in Mymensingh where he worked at Bangladesh Agricultural University. It is a great sadness that such a young life should be taken, and my thoughts are with his family and friends at this difficult time.

Graham Haylor

Not long after the opening of the Fish Museum & Biodiversity Center, Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain pictured alongside Professor Wahab welcome a cohort of university students to learn more about the aquatic resources and fauna of Bangladesh

Ranu explains his pictures with stories with some children from a village in Durgapur

The MSc in Aquatic Rural Development (ARD) (a joint venture between Inst of Aquaculture Univ of Stirling and BAU) started with the first opening lecture delivered to students in 2005 but the process and our friendship with Ranu started long before that with the various Commonwealth Scholarship Commission activities and student interviews in Bangladesh and all its satellite activities. On one trip we made a visit to the night school to pass over some learning materials, Ranu went and sat among the students. Another was when we went to the school, where his son was attending, and the teacher announced, “The doctors are here!” and the little lad in the photo bolted for the door because he thought we were there to give them vaccinations and he remembered how much it hurt last time!

Andy Shinn

Memorial gathering

At the time of his passing Ranu was actively involved with the Dried Fish Matters project, led by the University of Manitoba and supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Colleagues from that project held an online memorial gathering which you can view below.

Page banner photo: Professor Mostafa Ali Reza Hossain gives visiting dignitaries a guide around the fish museum and highlights its purpose as an education centre for all and his vision for the future.

Thanks to Dave Little and William Leschen for collating the quotations and photographs used in this blog post.