In Memoriam: V.C. Wynne-Edwards, 1906-1997

Abstract

Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards, or as he was known to colleagues, died near Aberdeen, Scotland, on 5 January 1997, in his 91st year. With scientific publications spanning 68 years, Wynne-Edwards was a key player in the development of ecology from its very beginnings, and he will be remembered as one of the greatest natural historians and innovative ecological thinkers of his generation. He became a member of the AOU in 1936 and a Corresponding Fellow in 1959. Wynne-Edwards was born in Leeds on 4 July 1906, the last but one in a family of six. His father, a Canon in the Church of England and headmaster of Leeds Grammar School, imparted in the young Wynne a keen interest in natural history, especially botany. After school at Rugby, he went to Oxford to read Zoology, in which he obtained a first-class degree. While there, he developed an interest in marine biology and obtained his first working position at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Plymouth, studying crustaceans and fish. In his spare time, he mapped out all of the starling roosts in the region, his first independent ornithological work. After two years in Plymouth, he moved to Bristol University as an assistant lecturer, but within a few months, newly married, he was invited in 1930 to take up a post at McGill University in Montreal, where he remained for 16 years. On the transatlantic voyage, Wynne spent his time on deck, recording the numbers and positions of seabirds. He thereby discovered the basic pattern of inshore (coastal), offshore (to edge of continental shelf), and pelagic (deep water) marine zones, with different species in each. Subsequently, through a personal contact, he persuaded the Cunard Line to ferry him, free of charge, on round trips across the Atlantic in May, June, July, August, and September. This enabled him to work out the seasonal movements of seabirds, including the loop migration of the Greater Shearwater. For this work, he won the Walker Prize of the Boston Natural History Society and established himself as one of the pioneers of marine ornithology. While at McGill, Wynne-Edwards worked mainly on freshwater fishes, but he also studied montane plants and seabirds in northern Labrador. His work on the postglacial distribution of plants won him a second Walker Prize and fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1946, he returned to Britain to take up the Regius Chair in Zoology in Aberdeen, a prestigious position that he held until his retirement in 1974. These 28 years coincided with a period of expansion in environmental research in Britain, enabling Wynne to create one of the largest and most successful zoology departments in Europe. He established a special for research on Red Grouse, eventually based at nearby Banchory, and an ecological field station at Culterty, on the Ythan Estuary, 15 miles up the coast. He also became active and influential on committees, valued for his breadth of experience. For a time, he was Chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council, the major government-funded body for environmental research in Britain. His interest in the arctic resurfaced in 1950, when he participated in the Baird Expedition to northeast Baffin Island, from which he wrote an account of the birds (Auk 69:353-391, 1952) and a note on the huge colony of Northern Fulmars at Cape Searle (Arctic 5:105-117, 1952). In 1953, he took himself to Baffin Island, mainly studying seabirds, and later joined the end of Baird's second expedition. Wynne's major scientific achievement was his 650-page book Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour (1962), in which he proposed that animals could regulate their own population levels, thereby avoiding over-exploitation of their food and other resources. The mechanism he proposed involved a new theory of genetic which he called group selection, in which groups that used their resources substainably thrived at the expense of more profligate groups, which died out. As Wynne appreciated, his idea ran contrary to the Dar-