Rohan Pethiyagoda

Early life and career

Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 19 November 1955. Secondary education at St Thomas’s College, Mount Lavinia. B.Sc. (Eng.) Hons. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, King’s College, University of London 1977; M.Phil. in Biomedical Engineering, University of Sussex 1980.

Service

From 1981-82 Pethiyagoda served as an engineer in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka, and from 1982-87 as director of that institution. In 1984 he was concurrently appointed chairman of Sri Lanka’s Water Resources Board.

Naturalist life

He resigned from government office in 1987 to commence work on a project to explore the island’s freshwater fishes, which led to his first book, Freshwater fishes of Sri Lanka (1990), a richly-illustrated account of the country’s freshwater-fish fauna.

Pethiyagoda diverted the profits from this book to an endowment for the Wildlife Heritage Trust (WHT), a foundation he established in 1990 to further biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka, with the business-model of publishing natural-history books and channeling the proceeds into further exploration and research. Between 1991 and 2012 WHT published some 40 books in both English and Sinhala, including widely circulated titles such as A field guide to the birds of Sri Lanka, one of several titles translated into Sinhala and, aided by a grant from the Biodiversity Window of the World Bank / Netherlands Partnership Programme, provided free to 5,000 school libraries. This program served, for the first time in Sri Lanka, to put scientific local-language biodiversity texts in the hands of young people.

Discoveries

Together with colleagues at WHT Pethiyagoda has been responsible for the discovery and/or description of almost 100 new species of vertebrates from Sri Lanka, including fishes, amphibians and lizards, in addition to 43 species of freshwater crabs. This work also led to the finding that some 19 species of Sri Lankan amphibians have become extinct in the past 130 years, the highest national extinction record in the world.

Recognition

In 1998, concerned by the rapid loss of montane forest in Sri Lanka, Pethiyagoda began a (still on-going) project to convert abandoned tea plantations into natural forest, for which he was honoured by the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

In recognition of his contribution to biodiversity conservation Pethiyagoda, a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, served as Advisor on Environment and Natural resources to the Government of Sri Lanka from 2002–2004 and was in 2005 elected Deputy Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. In 2008 Pethiyagoda was elected to the board of trustees of the International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, having previously served a four-year term as Deputy Chair of the Assurance Group of the British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership. In addition to some 60 papers in the scientific literature, his most recently published books are on the history of natural-history exploration in Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan primates and Horton Plains National Park. He is a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and serves as editor for Asian Freshwater Fishes of the journal Zootaxa.

Legacy

Several new species have been named in his honour, including the fishes Dawkinsia rohani and Rasboroides rohani; the dragon lizard Calotes pethiyagodai; the jumping spider Onomastus pethiyagodai and the dragonfly Macromidia donaldi pethiyagodai.

In July 2012 Pethiyagoda and colleagues named a genus of South Asian freshwater fishes Dawkinsia in honour of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, following which Pethiyagoda told AFP that "Richard Dawkins has through his writings helped us understand that the universe is far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than any religion has imagined".