In the 1970s, studying wild tigers still involved more nerve than equipment. A biologist could not rely on camera traps, GPS collars, or satellite-linked data. To understand where a tiger went, what it killed, how far it ranged, and how its territory overlapped with others, someone had to follow it through forests and grasslands with a receiver, a notebook, and enough judgment to stay useful without getting in the way.
Radio collars began to change what was possible. They made the movements of secretive carnivores traceable in a new way. For tigers, jaguars, pumas, ocelots, and other animals that were rarely seen directly, they allowed field biologists to replace guesses with records. The work still depended on patience, careful handling, and a capacity to keep thinking when weather, roads, animals, or people refused to cooperate.
Melvin Eugene Sunquist, who died on May 9th at the age of 85, belonged to that generation of field scientists. Born in Morris, Minnesota, in 1941, he became one of the leading biologists of wild cats and large carnivores. He worked in Asia, Latin America, Panama, and Florida, and spent much of his academic life at the University of Florida, where he taught wildlife ecology and conservation from 1987 until his retirement in 2014. To students and colleagues he was “Mel,” a name that suited his manner: steady, spare with words, dry in humor, and difficult to unsettle.
His best-known early work was on tigers in Nepal. In Royal Chitwan National Park in the 1970s, he radio-tracked tigers when putting collars on them was still considered dangerous and uncertain. His Smithsonian monograph, The Social Organization of Tigers in Royal Chitawan National Park, Nepal, helped establish a scientific basis for understanding tiger movements, home ranges, territoriality, habitat use, feeding ecology, and social behavior. It also showed that individual tigers could be followed closely enough to make conservation less dependent on impressions.
This was important because tigers were often treated as symbols before they were understood as animals. Sunquist’s work helped bring them into view as individuals moving through specific landscapes, with needs, habits, and pressures that could be studied. Those who worked with him say he never lost sight of that. One former student remembered Sunquist introducing the story as one he had never told before, and did not intend to tell again, about a male tiger he had darted at the request of visiting officials and a journalist. The tiger ran after being hit, slowed as the drug took effect, and collapsed in a rain-filled hollow in a road. Sunquist reached him too late. Years later, telling the story at home, his composure broke. The tiger, he said, had been “a magnificent male tiger, the most perfect ambassador for his species.” The memory stayed with him, as did the blame.
That episode seems to have deepened his caution. Former students describe a scientist who cared about the animals under study as much as the population estimates, maps, and papers that came from them. He was practical about research because he knew its costs. Each capture carried a cost, and each animal in a trap deserved care before it yielded data. Rafael Hoogesteijn, a biologist who has been a member of the IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group for 40 years, remembered Sunquist handling raccoons and opossums at the Ordway Wildlife Preserve with care, trying to reduce their stress and talking to them as if they deserved courtesy: “Hey, old Mama, it’s a tough life out there, isn’t it?”
At Florida, Sunquist became part of a strong generation of tropical field biologists. With John Eisenberg, John Robinson, and others, he helped make the university a center for tropical conservation and wildlife ecology. Students came from many countries. Conservation organizations sent young biologists there because they wanted them trained by people who had worked in difficult places and could connect science to conservation practice. Sunquist’s office, field courses, and kitchen table all became routes into that world.
His teaching was spare and direct, without theatrics or command. Former students describe him as someone who taught by example, through field problems, small remarks, and well-timed trust. Ines Maxit, a former student, remembered meeting him on a forest trail and being asked a question almost immediately: “Why do sloths climb down from the trees to defecate?” Sunquist offered no answer and simply continued down the trail. Years later, the question remained memorable for what it revealed about his teaching, which could leave students with a question they had to work through themselves.
In the Wildlife Field Techniques course at Ordway, undergraduates handled live traps, small mammals, raccoons, opossums, and prescribed fire in the Florida heat. The course was physical, uncomfortable, and useful. Lisa Korte, one of his teaching assistants, remembered a trap containing a mother raccoon and four young kits. Sunquist was delighted, then began showing the students how to handle the situation with care and skill. Many students later got their first field jobs because of what they had learned there.
His style with graduate students was similar. He gave them room to work. He trusted them enough that the trust became part of their training. Jim Sanderson, who studied the güiña in Chile, remembered that Sunquist had planned to help with the capture campaign but could not travel because of a family emergency. Sanderson had no funding and had hoped for Sunquist’s field presence. Instead he received a sentence that carried him into the work: “I have complete confidence in you. You don’t need my help to do it.” From a man who knew wild cats as well as anyone, the reassurance carried authority. It was permission to act like a scientist.
Many of his students did. Ullas Karanth, later one of the leading tiger biologists in India, was among those shaped by Sunquist’s work and mentorship. Karanth later recalled sitting with Sunquist in trees while tracking and darting tigers, and credited him with teaching the techniques that helped launch his own career. “I couldn’t have found a better person to teach me,” he remembered. His daughter, Krithi Karanth, met Sunquist in India as a child while he was helping train her father to capture and radio-collar tigers. After several animals had been collared, he patiently taught her to use the receiver and antenna to follow different tigers and leopards by their frequencies. Years later, when she arrived at the University of Florida as an undergraduate, Mel and Fiona welcomed her into their home and continued the mentorship.
Others went on to careers with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, universities, conservation agencies, and field projects across the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Tadeu de Oliveira, a former student who became co-chair of the IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group, described himself as an “offspring” of Sunquist, formed by what he called the University of Florida’s “school of conservation.” Behind the emotion was a practical inheritance: writing, trapping, field judgment, patience, and a demand that science serve animals and places outside the university.
Sunquist’s partnership with Fiona Sunquist was part of that formation. They met in Asia and married in 1976. She became his collaborator in research, writing, travel, and teaching, and together they produced books that carried field knowledge beyond the small circle of specialists. Wild Cats of the World, Tiger Moon: Tracking the Great Cats in Nepal, The Wild Cat Book, Mammals of Florida, and other works drew on scientific literature, naturalists’ accounts, field experience, and a gift for explanation. Their home also became an informal extension of the department, a place where students and colleagues from many countries passed through, talked, stayed, ate, and learned that conservation extended into daily life.
He had a dry humor that worked because it was economical. Andres Novaro, who was bitten by an opossum and scratched by a raccoon during a field course before returning to Argentina, recalled Sunquist’s advice, delivered seriously, with only the hint of a smile: “I recommend you do not attempt to capture pumas when you go back to work in Argentina.” Laura Farrell remembered him perched on the hood of a vehicle in the Venezuelan llanos, radio-tracking a jaguar with two cubs down a muddy road, calling for the driver to go faster though he seemed likely to bounce off into the mud. On the same trip, he stopped at a bridge, got out, and went down the bank to inspect an anaconda beneath it.
Such stories can make field scientists sound reckless. Sunquist’s composure came from experience. He had spent enough time with heat, insects, failed signals, bad roads, difficult negotiations, wet seasons, stubborn animals, and human confusion to know that panic rarely helped. In Venezuela, Farrell watched him and Eisenberg negotiate the future of a field project with a ranch owner in a language the team did not speak fluently. The project, designed to understand predation by jaguars and pumas and to find practical ways for ranchers to coexist with large carnivores, continued. What stayed with Farrell was the example: experienced biologists protecting the work without drama.
His range was wider than wild cats alone. He studied sloths in Panama, black bears and other mammals in Florida, opossums in the Venezuelan llanos, and carnivores across several continents. Robinson recalled the wet-season challenge of supplying cat food, or withholding it, from female opossums across a partly flooded landscape as part of a field test of sex-ratio theory. Even there, far from the public appeal of tigers, Sunquist’s strength was the same: turn the question into fieldwork, then do the fieldwork well.
Colleagues often mention what he noticed: a call in the forest, a reptile moving away from a prescribed fire, or young in the pouch of a road-killed opossum. Korte remembered that he would take orphaned young from dead female opossums and raise them until they could be released. The care was part of the same attentiveness that made the science good.
There was little appetite in him for display. Susan Walker described him as calm, steady, respectful, humble, and unassuming, never making the work about himself. John Polisar put it more bluntly: in a field with many forceful personalities, Sunquist had none of the arrogance that often comes with authority. Yet he knew a great deal, and he shared it freely. That combination helps explain why his influence carried so far. He gave students something more useful than imitation: standards, confidence, and an example of how to behave around animals, colleagues, and uncertainty.
Late in life he retired from Florida and moved with Fiona to Tallahassee. Former students continued to carry his habits into their own field sites: check the trap carefully, reduce the animal’s stress, trust the student when trust is earned, write clearly, and choose work that matters beyond the paper.
Shortly before he died, a mountain lion was photographed in Minnesota with three young. One former student hoped he had heard of it. After a life spent following wild cats through forests, savannas, ranchlands, and swamps, the return of one to his home state would have required no grand statement. The animal was there. That was enough.
