After a brief illness and under hospice care, Phil Bishop, a zoology professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and a globally renowned champion of amphibian conservation, died on January 23. He was 63 years old.
Rob Gandola, the senior science officer for the Herpetological Society of Ireland, tells
The Scientist that Bishop “was a gentleman and an incredible scientist with an unparalleled and infectious enthusiasm for the amphibians of the world, and their conservation. He will be sorely missed.”
Bishop, who was born in Devon in southern England, attended University College Cardiff (now known as Cardiff University) in Wales for his undergraduate degree in zoology and stayed at the institution to get his master’s in parasitology, graduating in 1980. His PhD research in zoology was done at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. There, he studied a variety of aspects of frog behavior, with his thesis on the social aspects of the chorus of frog mating calls, including intensity and duration, and how the female frogs responded.