Tony Whitten
Naturalist and biodiversity expert who campaigned to protect threatened ‘karst’ limestone ecosystems
TONY WHITTEN, who has died in a cycling accident in Cambridge aged 64, was a leading specialist in biodiversity who spent 15 years with the World Bank before being appointed Regional Director for Asia Pacific with the Cambridge-based conservation NGO Flora and Fauna International (FFI), overseeing projects ranging from tiger conservation in Sumatra to marine and coastal work in Cambodia and projects to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in Kalimantan.
On the day he died Whitten had just returned from an annual trip to eastern Indonesia, where he led groups of amateur naturalists in the footsteps of his hero, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the pre-eminent field biologist of tropical regions of the 19th century and Darwin’s rival in the race to understand evolution.
Like his hero, Whitten was first and foremost a field scientist and, inspired by reading The Malay Archipelago, the book Wallace wrote about his travels through Indonesia and Malaysia, he travelled to the Mentawai islands off the western coast of Sumatra to study primates, then to write the first ever book on The Ecology of Sumatra (1984), one of several he published on the ecology of Indonesia.
Whitten’s main interest, however, lay not in what are known as “charismatic megafauna” – attractive, easy-to-anthropomorphise animals such as elephants, tigers and apes
– but in the slimy, or creepy-crawly, invertebrates and strange plants that live in the hills, caves and sinkhole complexes of limestone “karst” landscapes, many of them under threat from cement companies.
He was founder and co-chairman of the cave invertebrate specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and had recently helped to establish the IUCN’S specialist group on karst environments, of which he was chairman, to campaign for greater protection for this habitat.
Whitten’s discoveries led to no fewer than 11 species being named after him, among them Thopeutica whitteni, the gold-spotted tiger beetle from Sulawesi, Sulawesidromia whitteni, the lake snail from Sulawesi, Anaglyphula whitteni, a snail from Bali, and the Pilosaphaenops whitteni whitteni blind cave beetle from China. He called them “a rather bizarre eponymous bestiary of Whitten curiosities”.
Anthony John Whitten was born on April 10 1953 in Camberwell, the son of Jack Whitten, a chartered secretary, and his wife Mollie (née Smart). From Dulwich College he went to Southampton University to read Environmental Science.
Before university, he volunteered at Slimbridge nature reserve, where he met the naturalist Peter (later Sir Peter) Scott, who became a close mentor. Whitten’s first published paper was on ducks’ sense of smell and his second on the mating display of the blue duck. For his PHD, at King’s College, Cambridge, he moved on to primates.
In 1976 he married Jane Trussell, a fellow field scientist, and shortly after marrying they travelled to Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai island chain, where Tony studied the endangered Kloss gibbon and Jane small mammals.
This led to the publication of Whitten’s first popular book The Gibbons of Siberut (1982) and to a job as an adviser in the Centre of Environmental Studies at the University of North Sumatra, where he initiated a series of major ecology books on different areas of Indonesia.
He went on to write three important volumes on the ecology of Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java and Bali, while employed by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. During his time in Indonesia he became involved with freshwater fish and land snails, about which he also wrote books. Meanwhile he consulted for major development agencies on land settlement, indigenous people, forest issues, and biodiversity. He joined the biodiversity unit of the World Bank in 1995, having advised the bank on land settlement and transmigration in Malaysia and Indonesia.
He spent 15 years at the bank, supporting projects on habitat policy issues and regional initiatives, and undertaking his own conservation projects in Mongolia, China, Indonesia and other countries. Among other things he was instrumental in brokering an action plan, agreed by the governments of Laos and Vietnam in 2004, aimed at combating the unsustainable regional trade in wildlife for use as exotic food and for supposed medicinal properties.
He managed to integrate ecological principles into many major projects, but as a rare ecologist among economists, described himself as an “odd bird” at the bank, and he never got used to desk work. “If I were fabulously rich I’d probably be doing something similar to what filled most of my time – but without the bureaucracy,” he admitted later.
He left the bank in 2010 and the following year joined FFI as regional director for Asia-pacific, though he disliked what he called the “conservocrat” aspects of the job and had recently stepped down to concentrate on his real passions: karst habitats, caves and beetles.
His interest in karst began in the 1990s while he was working for the World Bank, when French ecologists expressed concern about limestone hills in Vietnam, home to rare species of birds and mammals, that were being destroyed for cement extraction. “They didn’t consider the other species that might be lodged in the limestone,” he recalled. “The environment these species were in was rather like coral reefs – they grew upwards towards the light, and they were then being exposed and eroded.”
Whitten went to Vietnam, beginning an odyssey in the karst quarries which resulted in the discovery of many new species. He became involved in cave surveys across south-east Asia, talking to monks and local officials to make them aware of this work and knocking on the doors of major cement companies to ask them not to destroy fragile limestone ecosystems to fuel the construction industry.
In 1999 he co-authored Biodiversity and Cultural Property in the Management of Limestone Resources: Lessons from East Asia, published by the bank, highlighting threats to karst habitats throughout the east Asia and Pacific region. This has generated interest in limestone ecosystems, inspiring conservation projects in Vietnam and China and dialogue with the World Business Council’s Sustainable Cement Initiative.
A month before his death, Whitten had announced the discovery of 15 gecko species within Myanmar’s (Burma’s) karst landscapes during a two-week expedition in October last year. His name was given to one of the species, Hemiphyllodactylus tonywhitteni, a gecko found in only one cave in the Taunggyi district.
“It’s the 11th species to bear my name,” Whitten told the Cambridge Independent. “There’s been fish, snails and three beetles, including a dung beetle.”
Whitten’s Christian faith was a foundation of his passion for nature and this was one reason for his strong advocacy of working with all faiths as conservation partners.
Two of the species named after him were named jointly with his wife, including a goby fish discovered near the Gitgit waterfall in Bali, whose males he described as having “rather peculiar, bilobed, auxiliary genitals”.
Tony Whitten is survived by his wife Jane, sister Mary, and children Ruth, Peter, Jon and Andrew.
Tony Whitten, born April 10 1953, died November 29 2017