John Thorbjarnarson, a Crocodile and Alligator Expert, Is Dead at 52
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Let’s say you are a boy who collects frogs and snakes from a neighborhood bog and who keeps a spectacled caiman and boa constrictor as pets. Further, you take the boa into the family pool to cavort, although the human swimmers might have used a different verb.
It probably goes without saying that your Facebook page three decades later will feature a photo of you with a lizard squirming on your head. But make an actual career out of reptiles? Why not?
John Thorbjarnarson went on to become one of the world’s leading experts on crocodiles and alligators. He also came up with strategies to help preserve crocodilian species that were on the verge of extinction when he went to work a quarter century ago.
Then, 20 of 23 species teetered on the edge of oblivion. Now, seven do.
Dr. Thorbjarnarson, a herpetologist, died at the age of 52 on Feb. 14 in New Delhi. The Wildlife Conservation Society,his employer, said he had contracted malaria while studying the dwarf crocodile in Uganda. He died of the disease after coming to India to speak to a wildlife group.
John Robinson, chief conservation officer for the wildlife society, said Dr. Thorbjarnarson (pronounced thorb-YAR-nar-son) had become “the most well-known crocodilian guy around the world” — not least because of his energy and ubiquity. He studied crocodiles and their close cousins in more than 30 countries.
Moreover, his contributions to understanding Orinoco crocodiles in northern Venezuela and the Chinese alligator and the black caiman in the Amazon have given tentative hope that these nearly extinct species may have a chance. Dr. Thorbjarnarson helped preserve habitats for these and other species, often by helping to convince farmers and other native peoples that they had a real stake in the animals’ survival — sometimes by allowing controlled hunting.
In 2004, the World Conservation Union awarded its Castillo Prize for crocodilian conservation to Dr. Thorbjarnarson for “multiple and long-term efforts in global crocodilian conservation.”
Dr. Thorbjarnarson’s research ranged from the international trade in crocodile skins, to studying DNA from crocodile mummies in the Egyptian pyramids, to counting crocodiles in Haiti.
Dr. Robinson acknowledged that the work was not for the squeamish. Many crocodilians can ambush at close range with blurring speed. No species has stronger jaws.
“You have to be out there in the swamp in the dark in a boat that can easily get capsized,” Dr. Robinson said. “That’s what John just loved to do.”
John Bjorn Thorbjarnarson, whose father immigrated from Iceland, was born in Boston on March 23, 1957. He remembered seeing a television show about alligators in the Everglades when he was 13 or 14, and realizing that there might be a career in something like that.
“I guess you could say I was obsessed to some extent with reptiles,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson said in 1995 in an interview with The Record, a northern New Jersey newspaper. The obsession took him to Cornell, where he earned a degree in biology in 1979. He then went to the University of Florida because of its proximity to alligators, but wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the spectacled caiman, his childhood pet.
Postdoctoral work at the wildlife society — which does worldwide research and conservation, in addition to running the Bronx Zoo — led to a permanent job there in 1993. He wrote scores of academic papers, and his second book, on Chinese alligators, is to be published in April.
Dr. Thorbjarnarson worked for more than a decade in Cuba, helping mentor a generation of crocodile experts. In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, he said, “I have to walk a delicate line between what the U.S. allows me to do and what the Cubans allow me to do.”
Some of his research veered away from crocodiles and their cousins to turtles and even flamingos. In the 1990s he led the first study of the natural habitat of the anaconda in Venezuela. In Americas magazine, published by the Organization of American States, he told of literally wrestling with a big snake, before he and his colleagues realized that they had no way to measure it. They finally used his sock to find that the reptile was 13 ½ socks (or 16 feet) long.
Dr. Thorbjarnarson discovered that anacondas have a fascinating mating system, in which as many as seven male snakes intertwine in a wriggling mass around the female. The researchers could not determine whether one male mates with the female, or whether the female’s brood is the product of multiple fathers.
Dr. Thorbjarnarson is survived by his father, Bjorn; his mother, Margaret; his sisters, Kathryn Thorbjarnarson and Lisa Enslow; and his half-sisters, Gudron and Kristin Bjornsdottir.
Reporters often called Dr. Thorbjarnarson to ask how dangerous alligators and crocodiles are. In the interest of the animals’ safety, he played down their ferocity.
But when The Daily News in New York asked him in 1998 about the viciousness of Godzilla (a new movie about the giant lizard was being filmed in New York), Dr. Thorbjarnarson pulled no punches. He said that big reptiles like meat, and that Godzilla, if he really existed, would head for Manhattan because of the population density.
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