While a man has been charged with the shocking killing of respected entomologist Stephen Thorpe in Blockhouse Bay his grieving friends and colleagues are left to grieve the end to his enormous contribution to science. Jamie Morton reports.
Lepidoscia heliochares.
That was the tiny, dull-coloured moth that marked the last of 92,684 plants and insects that Stephen Ernest Thorpe helped identify for the citizen scientist website iNaturalist.
The bug had been snapped in Wellington by another keen nature-watcher on Saturday morning, and Thorpe, being a walking encyclopedia of entomology, readily offered its name and description.
The moth, an Australian species belonging to the bagworm family, is described as an inconspicuous, gentle creature that’s active during the day and generally keeps to itself.
That’s also how friends and colleagues have characterised Thorpe, who, less than an hour after noting the moth’s species, was dead.
The 54-year-old was stabbed by an unknown assailant - still being hunted by police - during a violent struggle outside Auckland’s Blockhouse Bay Tennis Club.
Friends are struggling to reconcile such a horrific event with the small-statured, quietly spoken and educated person they loved.
He was someone who suspected he was on the autism spectrum, and had no known family in New Zealand. He was happiest in his work, doing his bit to shine some light on the world of undescribed plants and insects living around us.
He was a stickler for detail and accuracy, and fellow experts spoke of copping his ire and frank criticism – as had this reporter – when he thought they’d got something wrong.
But he was just as known for generously sharing his time and enormous knowledge with those as curious about nature as he was – especially young people.
At the University of Auckland, Thorpe completed a degree in chemistry and a Master of Arts majoring in philosophy, before pursuing a path as an independent entomologist in the late 1990s.
While he worked closely with scientists at his former university, as well as Manaaki Whenua-Landcare Research, and Auckland Museum, most of those placements were voluntary.
“He was phenomenal in his ability to identify species – but more than that, to ping the really cool and interesting things about them,” said Professor Jacqueline Beggs, who was assisted by Thorpe at her university lab throughout much of the 2000s.
“Many of the techniques we use for collecting insects will bring up a vast array of different individuals – and within those hundreds, if not thousands, he had an uncanny ability to spot the most unusual and important ones.”
Thorpe personally contributed some 12,000 specimens to Auckland Museum, where veteran curator John Early fondly recalled his “prodigious memory” – particularly of native beetles.
“He also had the knack of recognising unusual foreign insects that had established here and had not hitherto been recorded.”
That made him a particularly powerful asset for biosecurity agencies tasked with monitoring new pest incursions.
In 2004, Early and Thorpe were honoured when two species of a beetle family that’d never been found in New Zealand were each named for them.
By the time of his death, Thorpe had a dozen such namesakes, including the tiny fly Zealantha thorpei, the beetle Sagola thorpei, and the mite Uropoda thorpei.
In all, he made a whopping 28,807 observations of some 5333 for iNaturalist, which has become an increasingly popular online platform for working and hobby scientists alike.
As a tribute posted yesterday on the website noted, on the day before his death he’d entered records for a wide range of species, including weevils, flies, moths, snails, ferns, and mosses.
Dave Seldon, the Entomological Society of New Zealand’s Auckland branch president, said Thorpe uploaded images to the site nearly every day – and was always out around the city’s green spaces searching for new discoveries.
“He was very specific about doing only New Zealand stuff.”
Prominent citizen scientist Siobhan Leachman couldn’t stress enough what Thorpe’s loss had meant to the small community, and biodiversity efforts in New Zealand in general.
He was highly regarded here, Leachman said, but also internationally, as shown by tributes that have begun flowing in from overseas.
Wildlands Consultants’ Olly Ball, who shared a decade-long working relationship with Thorpe, recalled it took some time to connect with him at first.
“He was quiet, for sure, and with new people it took him a while to get out of his shell ... but eventually we had some really good, open conversations about his youth and upbringing.”
For Ball’s work in the Te Paki Ecological District, a biodiversity hotspot at the top of the North Island, Thorpe’s native beetle expertise proved invaluable.
“I could hold up a little vial, with a tiny black dot in there measuring three or four millimetres, and he’d be able to tell me what species it was.”
Ball said all he could do to thank Thorpe was to buy him lunch: but even then, he demanded little.
“He’d tell me that ‘it doesn’t take much to keep me going’ and that he could basically live off the smell of an oily rag,” he said.
“No, he didn’t want much, except to be with his microscope and insects.”
Friends said he supported himself with the odd contract and tended to live frugally.
Most days, he stuck to the same schedule: logging onto iNaturalist on his laptop at the Whau River Catchment Trust’s Blockhouse Bay offices, a little breakfast, field outings, then an afternoon session of uploading what he’d found.
The trust’s offices are located beneath the tennis club – and it was in its carpark that Thorpe is thought to have encountered his killer that day.
Following a breakthrough on Wednesday afternoon Police charged a 26-year-old man on Thursday morning with the murder of Stephen Thorpe.
“Completely random”, is how his friend and fellow naturalist Jacqui Knight described the tragedy, saying Thorpe had no enemies.
“He was somehow attacked when he left the premises, and didn’t manage to get to the tennis club, where he knew people were that could help him.”
On Tuesday, loved ones gathered to bless the scene, some embracing each other in tears.
Already, a Givealittle fundraising campaign is underway to install a seat in Thorpe’s memory at the Blockhouse Bay Recreational Reserve, for people to quietly enjoy nature.
“Stephen would appreciate that,” the notice said.
For the small and tight-knit entomology community he gave so much of life to – and which is paying its own respects to Thorpe at the society’s national conference in Christchurch this week – the question is what would’ve prompted anyone to murder him.
“His death is tragic and untimely,” said Early, “not just for its horrific circumstances, but also that his valuable contribution to New Zealand entomology is now ended”.
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
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