John Tennent

After a largely ineffectual education, John Tennent (JT) learned to think independently, serving in the British Army between 1967 and 1989, mostly overseas. It was an occupation that allowed him to take part in, and often to lead, expeditions to places as far apart as Panama, Bermuda, the Himalaya and Borneo, where he climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu in Sabah three times, on one occasion camping for several days just below the summit. In 1985 he was Deputy Field Leader of a four-months phase of Project Wallace, an international year-long expedition to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi sponsored by the Royal Entomological Society of London and supported by the British Armed Services and Indonesian Government.

JT resigned from the army in 1989 to pursue research into insects and the history of natural history in many parts of the world, usually on paths least travelled, and in 1996 led an Imperial College Expedition to climb to the summit of Mount Popomanaseu on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. His special interest is butterfly biogeography and systematics, which are strikingly exhibited in the southwest Pacific. Over more than two decades he has visited all the major islands of the region and hundreds of remote islands and atolls in the Solomons, Vanuatu and eastern Papua New Guinea (D’Entrecasteaux, Trobriands, Louisiades). He has also travelled extensively further east, including Fiji, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (now Kiribati and Tuvalu), Wallis & Futuna, Samoa, the Cook Islands and the Marquesas in French Polynesia.

JT was awarded the British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours List in 1981 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society in 1983. Following retirement, he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1995, made a Member of the Institute of Biology in 1998 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2015. He gained a Master of Science degree in Biodiversity Management in 1998 and was invited to become a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London the same year. He was awarded the Linnean Society H H Bloomer medal for contributions to science in 2007 and made a Member of the Order of Logohu (Logohu means ‘bird of paradise’) in the Papua New Guinea New Year’s honours list in 2015 for work on Pacific butterflies. He was invited to become an Honorary Associate of Oxford University Natural History Museum in 2017.

The author of more than 300 scientific papers and reviews, as well as several books on butterflies, an anthology of insects in poetry through the ages and a biography of famous naturalist Albert Stewart Meek, he has described some 180 new butterfly species and subspecies, many discovered by himself. Gratis copies of a field guide to the butterflies of Vanuatu were supplied to each of 600 schools in Vanuatu.

Travel has always been of paramount importance; he has been in the field in numerous remote places, from the Canadian arctic, the East Sayan Mountains and the area north of Lake Baikal, to the deserts and Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, and the Pacific, often for several months at a time. He has been supported in these endeavours by grants from learned societies and museums, and from National Geographic, Washington. He has a wide variety of interests outside entomology, including poetry, music and photography.