Mike Bigger's obituary reads like a field guide to a vanished mode of scientific work — the kind where you lived for years in remote stations with a shortwave radio, drew your own insect illustrations, and shipped your collections to the British Museum. He was a tropical entomologist employed by the Overseas Development Agency from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, and his career spanned Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, the Solomon Islands, and Bhutan. The signature insight is worth lingering on. Bigger discovered that adjusting the density of shade trees over cocoa plantations could promote populations of black or weaver ants, which drive out fire ants — the smaller species whose stings cause severe burns to plantation workers. This is pest management through ecological architecture rather than chemical bombardment, and it required the mathematical modeling of insect populations that Bigger adopted early, well before it was standard practice in tropical agriculture. Born in 1929 to British parents in Nablus, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, Bigger grew up in a household where his father was a medical doctor and his mother a pharmacist. The family relocated to the UK as violence escalated in Palestine. He was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, studied natural sciences at Trinity College Dublin, and completed tropical entomology at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad in 1955-56. His first posting, to Nachingwea in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), set the pattern for a life lived in far-flung research stations. He married Gerry Whitcroft, a biologist, in 1962, and the two of them spent decades in places most scientists would visit once and leave. The isolation was real — long periods with few visitors — but by their own account, thoroughly enjoyed. Bigger's scientific illustrations were published in seven books, including The Insect Pests of Forest Plantation Trees in the Solomon Islands (1988) and A Guide to Insect Pests of Nigerian Crops (1996). He was also a wood carver and tapestry maker. His insect collections were donated to various institutions, including the British Museum, though many specimens left behind in the Solomon Islands were destroyed during the 2000 coup there. After a final posting in Bhutan in 1989, the Biggers returned to the UK. Gerry died in 2024. Mike is survived by their two children, Clare and the obituary's author, and five grandchildren. He was 95.
