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Chris is the RES’s Coordinator of National Insect Week and he is Emeritus Professor of Post-Harvest Technology at the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich. His early interest in natural history arose from summer holidays spent on his grandfather’s farm in Norfolk at harvest time in the 1950s. A focus on insects was encouraged by his primary school headmaster, who bred exotic Lepidoptera in a large conservatory at the side of the schoolhouse and gave some of the moth eggs (silkworms, Indian moon moths, various hawk moths) to interested pupils, with instructions on how to rear them to adults. Chris realized how exciting insects could be when one of his final-instar hawk-moth caterpillars, having escaped from its cage in its search for a pupation site, walked across his mother’s neck in the middle of the night – the ensuing scream was hugely memorable! After a largely insect-free biological education at grammar school and for the first two years of his zoology degree (dominated by a curious dichotomy of marine invertebrate taxonomy and cell biology), he was finally able to focus on insect ecology in his final year, in which he undertook a project on grain weevils. He did his PhD studies on the ecology of ground beetles (carabids) in the New Forest in Hampshire, which gave him experience of both the pleasures and the rigorous demands of fieldwork, especially at the midsummer peak of carabid abundance and activity. Carabids remain his favourite insects. After finishing his PhD research he found employment with the then Tropical Stored Products Centre, undertaking research and teaching on the ecology and management of pests of stored food in the tropics (including the grain weevils that had been the subject of his undergraduate project). The laboratory went through many institutional changes over the years, but Chris remained with it for 30 years, when it had become part of the Food Security Department of the Natural Resources Institute. He enjoyed a five-year secondment to work on grain pests in Indonesia (including several visits to other countries in South-East Asia), and also conducted field work in Kenya and Nigeria. His storage pest research interests included: the impact of predatory mites on warehouse moths; the potential for control and monitoring of warehouse moths using sex pheromones; the diversity and ecology of pests, predators and parasites in insect and arachnid communities in tropical grain stores; techniques for quantitative monitoring of storage pest populations; and prospects for biorational alternatives to chemical pest control in food stores.

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