A globally renowned expert whose Cornish garden shed inventions have helped to protect wildlife around the world will be honoured by the University of Exeter.
Dr Nick Tregenza’s practical, cost-effective solutions have helped to transform marine mammal science and conservation across the planet. He will be awarded an honorary degree as part of the university’s Cornish graduation ceremonies at Truro Cathedral.
Dr Tregenza has carried out his work as a conservation activist, serial inventor of devices to inform ecology and conservation, a businessman and researcher alongside a long career as a family doctor.
He is affectionately known among conservationists and scientists as the POD-father after developing instruments called the Porpoise Detector, or PODs, to monitor dolphins and porpoises by recognising their echo-location click sounds.
This has revolutionised the way these animals can be monitored by making it possible, for the first time, to discover the locations of some the most endangered species in the world, to see how their numbers are changing, and to rapidly assess methods of keeping them out of fishing gear.
Dr Tregenza developed the POD in his garden shed and 5,000 have been made. Dr Tregenza supports their use in developing countries, running workshops and training around the world.
A family doctor for 30 years in Hayle, Dr Tregenza also worked in his own time on local nature conservation issues and on wider issues that included organising observation of three commercial fisheries – gill-netting, pelagic trawling and tuna drift netting.
In 1989, he set up a voluntary group to collect data on strandings and sightings of large sea creatures and he was a founder of Seaquest Southwest, which helped to identify the existence of substantial unintentional capture (or bycatch) of dolphins in regional fisheries.
He subsequently acted as advisor to numerous organisations over the years: from the Cornwall Sea Fisheries Committee to the International Whaling Commission.
His other inventions include the Banana Pinger, which emit sounds that allow the animals to “hear and avoid” the net and reduce bycatch.
Dr Tregenza said: “A Hon Doc! What a shock! But it’s great that work inspired by a love of nature and enabled right here by, among many others, Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the fishermen of Newlyn should get this recognition.”
Professor Martin Siegert, deputy vice-chancellor of the Cornwall campus in Penryn, said: “We are thrilled to be able to celebrate Dr Tregenza’s achievements, which have had such a lasting impact on conservation and science.
“It will be wonderful to mark his work, and that of our University of Exeter in Cornwall students, and to wish them well as they go on to their next steps.”