Nicholas Farrar Hughes (January 17, 1962 – March 16, 2009)[3] was a British and American[2] fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology.
On February 11, 1963, while Nicholas, age one, and his sister Frieda, two and a half, slept upstairs, Plath taped shut the doorframe of the room in which the children slept, then placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure fumes could not escape to harm the children, and died by suicide using the toxic gas from the kitchen oven.
In 1970, Ted Hughes married his long-time lover Carol Orchard, and the children continued their life on the family farm in Devon.
[9][10] Despite the posthumous fame of Sylvia Plath, and the growing literary and biographical writings about her death, Nicholas was not told about the circumstances of his mother's suicide until the 1970s.
According to Fairbanks reporter Dermot Cole: The focus of Nick's professional life... dealt with what might appear to be a simple question, but was extraordinarily complex: "Why do fish prefer one position over another?"
The logic of his research was that the combination of water flow and the streambed guide the way natural selection influences the behavior of individual salmon, grayling, trout and other species... A few times, I called him to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections, whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened.
[13]Hughes resigned from his faculty position at UAF in December 2006, but continued his scientific research[6] of king salmon until his death.