Dr Tony Whitten: Snail named after 'fighter' conservationist

Dr Tony Whitten was killed in a cycling crash in Cambridge in 2017

A British conservationist has had a snail in Indonesia named after him as local scientists decided the species shared his "fighter" spirit.

Dr Tony Whitten's work included documenting biodiversity in Asia before he died in a Cambridge cycling crash.

A prize fund was set up in his name after his death.

One winner named a species of snail Landouria tonywhitteni. It lives in a limestone habitat which threatened by quarrying for the cement industry.

Dr Whitten was a senior advisor with Cambridge-based Fauna and Flora International - one of the world's oldest conservation groups - and he already had 11 species named in his honour at the time of his death in 2017.

The prize fund was set up for "young people doing the kind of work Tony was passionate about".

Dr Ayu Nurinsiyah, junior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences in Jakarta, categorised the snail after finding it in Java in 2017.

Parts of south-east Asia are often home to creatures not found elsewhere but are under threat because limestone is an ingredient for cement.

Dr Ayu Nurinsiyah said the £1,000 would go towards an expedition and her family

The name Landouria tonywhitteni became valid in 2019 after details were published in the European Journal of Taxonomy

Dr Nurinsiyah, 33, one of six winners of £1,000 from the prize fund, said: "I said to my professor 'why don't we name this after Tony Whitten?' because it's just so like him, fighting for nature.

"This species can represent him because he was a nature-fighter conservationist."

Other winners include a woman for work on millipedes in China and a man for his work on the conservation of Myanmar's karst habitats.

Tony Whitten pictured with his wife Jane on an expedition

Prof Andrew Balmford, from Cambridge University, said they wanted to "encourage" young people in those regions with the prize fund.

He said Dr Whitten "utterly championed building local capacity" and "actively tried to promote conservation and stop harmful development".

"I had no idea there were that number of such professional and passionate people now following on Tony's legacy and taking that on to their own countries, finding species and using them to campaign for nature," he said.

"I'd known Tony for a long time and was bowled over by the impact he made."

A woman was sentenced for causing Dr Whitten's death by careless or inconsiderate driving.