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Dr Dennis Chitty is an Emeritus Professor of Zoology at UBC. He has studied wild animal population cycles for more than 60 years and is regarded as a world expert on lemmings. He came to Canada in 1930 and worked with the Ontario Fisheries Research Laboratory summers while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. He has written many scientific papers on the changes in natural populations of animals, especially small mammals. Chitty’s studies are cited in all ecological textbooks and he has inspired a large number of experimental ecologists. His book Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?: Beautiful Hypotheses and Ugly Facts was released in 1996.

In this video, Dr Chitty describes how he initiated mark-recapture studies to investigate mammalian population cycles.

• Dr Chitty recollects the early days of ecology at UBC