Obituary for Michael Cullen, ethologist.pdf

Article in The Guardian Tuesday April 10, 2001

Obituary for Michael Cullen, ethologist

Mike Cullen, who has died in a car crash in Australia aged 73, had an extraordinary influence on the

development of ethology, the biological study of animal behaviour. He was of the generation of

Oxford ethologists that included Robert Hinde, Aubrey Manning and Desmond Morris, and he was

in many ways the unsung hero of that golden age in the subject. The impact of his razor-sharp,

quantitative, analytical mind came not from his own research publications, which were modest in

number, but from the difference he made to those who worked with him as doctoral students or

colleagues.

Unusually, he was a scientist who put the development of others and of the subject as a whole

ahead of his own career. All of us who worked with Mike can recall how he would take our

half-baked ideas, inadequately analysed data, or the hesitant beginnings of a mathematical model,

and transform them into a polished gem.

He would listen while eating his lunch from an old biscuit tin with a wire handle, one knee up,

shoulders slightly hunched, rocking back and forth with absorption, hands fanned open and palms

facing each other as if to grasp the issue under discussion. He would then rush off to a tutorial or

lecture. But next day one would receive a handwritten letter with the solution to the problem, some

lines of algebra, embellished by an apt - and untranslated - quotation from Catullus or a comic

verse made up by Mike himself to suit the occasion.

Mike hardly ever accepted co-authorship of publications, but the acknowledgements sections of

key papers published between the mid-1950s and 1980s show the breadth and depth of his

influence, as do the career successes of his students. He was the kind of academic that would be

pruned out in the contemporary, publish-or-perish, environment in universities. But if he had

followed what is now the common practice of putting his name on all the papers of students and

co-workers whom he had helped, he would have stood out as one of the most prolific ethologists of

his time.

Mike was born in Bournemouth, but spent his first six years in India, where his father worked for the

Bombay Company. Subsequently, together with his younger sister, he was brought up in England

by a great aunt and educated at Marlborough College before going to Wadham College, Oxford, to

read mathematics. He switched to zoology after the first year and graduated in 1952. His interest in

natural history, and birds in particular, had been triggered in Kashmir in 1942.

A few years before Mike graduated, the Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen had moved to Oxford to

set up the Animal Behaviour Group. Tinbergen is generally regarded, alongside Konrad Lorenz -

with whom he shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 - as one of the founding fathers of ethology. Mike, with

his interest in field biology, was naturally drawn to Tinbergen's group, and he completed his

doctorate under Tinbergen on the behaviour of Arctic terns.

Tinbergen sent Mike and a Swiss student, Esther Sager, who worked on kittiwakes, together to the

Farne Islands, off the coast of Northumberland. Perhaps unsurprisingly to their peers, Mike and

Esther not only both came away with D Phil theses, but, in 1954, married and were to have two

children. They stayed in Oxford, where Mike was Tinbergen's right-hand man from 1956 to 1969 in

the Animal Behaviour Research Group, which was funded by Nature Conservancy.

Ethology at that time had been developing, under Tinbergen's influence, from largely observational

studies of the behaviour of animals in their natural environment or in semi-natural captivity, into an

experimental and quantitative discipline. Cullen's role in shaping this research agenda at Oxford

was crucial: partly because of his mathematical facility - which Tinbergen almost totally lacked; but

also because of his extraordinarily quick intelligence and his generosity in deploying it for the

benefit of others

Almost all the students who came through the Tinbergen group from the mid-1950s to the early 70s

found their intellectual inspiration in Mike. To collaborate with him was exhilarating. Everything

happened at high speed, using rapidly improvised equipment which cost nothing. Typical of his

ingenuity was his method of plotting the three-dimensional coordinates of fish swimming in schools:

simply photograph them in a bright shadow-casting light, and do the necessary trigonometry using

the distance between each fish and its shadow.

When Tinbergen retired in 1974 from the chair in animal behaviour, Cullen, who in 1968 had

become lecturer in psychology - and a fellow of Wadham - was seen by many as his natural

successor. However, although his huge influence was acknowledged, his modest output of

published research weighed against him.

In 1977, Mike accepted an offer from Monash University in Melbourne, where he remained until he

retired in 1993. While there, he dedicated much effort to preserving the penguins of Phillip Island,

on which he also did much research: he considered his victory in this battle to be one of his greatest

achievements.

Sadly, Mike and Esther separated after their move to Australia, but Mike later found happiness with

Rita Krishovski. Mike was a warm-hearted, humorous and extraordinarily generous colleague, with

an insatiable appetite and youthful enthusiasm for research. He was also a brilliant lecturer, and a

model of what an Oxford tutor should be. Though a very private person, he would provide a

sympathetic shoulder and a strong arm when a student or colleague came to him with private

difficulties.

Stories of his mild eccentricities abound: his party act of fire-eating; his habit of knitting in seminars

to avoid wasting time with his hands; and taking binoculars to conferences, to scrutinise details of

tables and graphs shown by speakers.

Partly as a result of his casual dress and athletic appearance, he always looked much younger than

he was. In seminars he was a formidable sceptic and questioner: if you could get your research

past those quizzical eyebrows, you had nothing to fear from any audience in the world. We have

lost a much- loved mentor who taught us how teaching should be.

• Michael Cullen, ethologist, born December 14 1927; died March 23 2001

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