The Royal Irish Academy's New Survey of Clare Island, a unique multidisciplinary endeavour that together with Robert Lloyd Praeger's first Clare Island Survey provides an invaluable body of research informing future conservation of the natural and built heritage of Ireland and Europe. The first Clare Island Survey of 1909-11 was the most ambitious natural history project ever undertaken in Ireland and the first major biological survey of a specific area carried out in the world. The tenth volume in the New Survey of Clare Island series focuses on the zoology of Clare Island.
John Breen obtained his BSc in zoology followed by a PhD in social insect ecology at University College Cork (National University of Ireland). He spent a year studying bumblebees and ants at the Zoological Museum, University of Bergen, Norway, followed by a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, before taking up a position at the University of Limerick. He is a retired Associate Professor. His main research interests are in the ecology of Irish social insects and, more recently, beekeeping.
T.K. (Kieran) McCarthy (1949-2019) graduated from University College Cork, with a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1971 and a PhD on the Irish freshwater Hirudinea (leeches) in 1974. Following post-doctoral research in Oxford, Finland, and Dublin, he was appointed to the Zoology Department, N.U.I., Galway. Throughout his career, and after retirement in 2011, he continued his research on a variety of aspects of freshwater ecology (limnology, entomology, fish parasitology and biogeography) and especially on European eels. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Lodz, Poland, and the University of Tokyo, Japan.
Éamonn Lenihan is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Natural Sciences at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He obtained his PhD in Zoology in 2020 from NUIG. His research focuses on the ecology and conservation of the critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla) in hydropower-impacted rivers, but he is also interested in the migration dynamics of other diadromous fish species.