Although the concept of a ‘revolt against morphology’ in the nineteenth century has been criticized as too whiggish and too manichean, the central idea still holds that between 1880 and 1910 experimental science became the new ideal in biological research that was to remove comparative and evolutionary morphology from the top position in the hierarchy of the life sciences. First, I would like to nuance the traditional story of this ‘experimentalist take-over’, following Robert Kohler (2002). The new biology was not only a result of the rise of experimental techniques in the laboratory but also of the rise of its new corollary: the field. Statistics and ecology were too perceived as a radical departure from morphology. Second, I would like to relocate the narrative: away from the universities to the biological stations in the outer regions of Europe and the European colonies. These stations were founded by academics as training grounds, as guesthouses for international visitors and above all as places were laboratory trained scientists themselves could work in situ. In the Netherlands, zoologists constructed a marine biological station at the coast and hired a table at the international station of Naples. A marine station was built in Batavia in the Dutch Indies. Dutch botanists had the opportunity to do research in the two stations of the national botanical gardens in Buitenzorg, the Dutch Indies. These stations partly received state support outside the education budget. In order to secure, legitimize and even expand this funding, station directors developed new areas of research. They gradually adapted evolutionary embryology to deal with economically more interesting issues. In this abstract I will on the career of Paulus Hoek, the first station director of the Dutch zoological station in Den Helder (1876; 1890) later first general secretary of ICES in 1902. In the 1880s and 1890s he replaced his morphological research of barnacles and pycnogonids (Challenger reports) with an interest in the life cycles of fish. Hoek now started to work on basic statistical analysis of groups of different varieties of animals that shared the same habitat. He did this in order to ‘solve’ fisheries problems and satisfy his patron: the fisheries department of the ministry of the interior.