Vale Michael St John Warne (1962 - 2024)
The SETAC-AU community is greatly saddened by the passing of Dr Michael Warne in his sleep on 19th February 2024 at home in Brisbane, aged 61.
Michael was President of the Australasian Society for Ecotoxicology for two terms (from February 1999 to July 2002), and maintained valuable contributions to ASE and SETAC-AU throughout his career.
Most of us remember Michael as a very warm person who enjoyed life and had a great sense of humour, making him a pleasure to work with. His students admired him greatly and his enjoyment of life was particularly displayed at the ecotoxicology conferences where he would outdo his students at after session activities, including his famous ‘penguin dive’ – launching himself across the floor on his stomach. Michael’s dance floor moves were legendary at SETAC conferences. Michael was the primary instigator of our SETAC conference funny awards, which have been a long tradition and have now been copied at various overseas meetings. He also established the inaugural SETAC Ripple Award and presented it to the CSIRO Lucas Heights team at the SETAC conference in Townsville in September 2023. This will be a perpetual award and Michael will be very deserving of this posthumously as he had a big ripple effect through our whole ecotox community.
Michael took his science seriously and developed an illustrious international career, a huge legacy that included contribution to books, over 130 peer-reviewed papers, over 80 published reports, more that 6000 citations, 3 software programs, over 20 awards, including the SETAC Asia-Pacific Lifetime Achievement Award (2020). He co-authored papers and reports with more than 1000 colleagues.
Michael graduated from Newcastle University with 1st class Honours in 1985 and completed his PhD at Griffith University, Queensland in 1991 with a thesis entitled, "Mechanism and prediction of the non-specific toxicity of individual compounds and mixtures". Michael joined the Ecotoxicology Section of the NSW EPA as a Senior Research Ecotoxicologist, and worked out of the Gore Hill UTS campus, then to the new Lidcombe facility, between January 1994 and February 2004. Michael then worked at CSIRO Land and Water, Adelaide between 2004 and January 2011, reaching the position of Principal Research Scientist and Project Leader. From there he joined the Water Quality and Aquatic Ecosystem Health Branch, Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, before becoming Science Leader, Water Quality and Investigations, Queensland Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts – DSITIA. Michael developed an extensive monitoring program of pesticides in the Great Barrier Reef and used his collaborative skills to gain increasing acceptance of pesticide controls by catchment landholders.
Michael was a deep thinker, an enthusiastic and energetic scientist and an excellent collaborator and networker, developing good working relationships with CSIRO, the Commonwealth environment departments, universities within Australia and overseas, and other groups. For two years from 2016, Michael was seconded to Coventry University, UK, as Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, further extending his already impressive networks and contributing greatly to their ecotoxicology program. Apart from his high quality project work in the Great Barrier Reef, one of Michael’s lasting achievements was his involvement in the development of the 2000 ANZECC and ARMCANZ water quality guidelines for toxicants; in particular, he championed the use of the risk-based statistical distribution approach to developing guideline values for toxicants. This novel approach allowed us to develop guideline figures using statistical estimates of concentrations of a toxicant that would protect, say, 95% of species using chronic data. Michael negotiated this approach to acceptance by New Zealand and Hong Kong, before it was adopted by ANZECC and ARMCANZ. More recently, he collaborated in developing the current revision of these Guidelines by contributing his incisive thinking as part of the Toxicants Working Group.
Many of us will remember Michael’s mischievousness at after-conference activities. On a trip to China in June 2008 with CSIRO colleagues to give a week’s workshop in Guangzhou, Chinese customs confiscated all the equipment and cultures, but Michael was unflappable in this situation and scrounged around markets trying to buy fish, duckweed and gear to run the workshop. Also he was quite naughty as usual, having been told by our Chinese colleague not to go to a particular bar, however Michael encouraged the team to go to the bar and all wondered why the wine was so expensive; it was a brothel masquerading as a bar. On another lecture tour to China in June 2009, some students took Michael and Jenny Stauber to a karaoke bar and Michael heartily participated with his dance moves, much to the regret of everyone present! During the Covid lockdowns, Michael cheered many of us up by instigating the daily sharing of photographs depicting the wonderful natural world.
This short obituary doesn’t do justice to the contribution Michael has made to science, to pesticide issues in the Great Barrier Reef, to the development of national water quality guidelines and to the lives of the many people he has worked with. Michael will be very much missed both professionally and personally by his many former colleagues and friends, and the SETAC-AU community. He will be missed most of all by his wife Jeni and children Isabella and Cullen, as well as his older brother Douglas and sister Suzanne and others in his extended family.
Information complied by John Chapman, David Leece, Fleur Pablo, and CSIRO colleagues Jenny Stauber, Graeme Batley and others.
Vale Michael St John Warne (1962 - 2024)
At the time of his passing early this year, at the very young age of 61, Dr Michael St.J. Warne was an Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, and Co-Director of the Reef Catchments Science Partnership – a joint venture of the University of Queensland and the Queensland Department of Environment and Science. Michael was also an Honorary Professor of Ecotoxicology and Water Quality, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), University of Coventry, Coventry, UK.
For many of the SETAC Australasia membership, Michael was that gregarious guy that liked to dominate the dance floor at the SETAC AU conferences, but Michael’s involvement in the Australasian Ecotoxicology community stretched across more than 30 years, and is signposted by many milestones in Australasian ecotoxicology. Michael was a founding member of the Australasian Society of Ecotoxicology (prior to the society coming under the auspices of SETAC), serving as the society Vice President or President between 1995 and 2001. With respect to Michael’s career as an ecotoxicologist, there are too many distinctions to mention here, but there are a few indelible legacies, including:
Perhaps Michael’s greatest legacy is the impact he had upon various members of the ecotoxicology community throughout Australia and beyond. Over Michael’s career he supervised more than 50 postgraduate students, including PhDs, Masters and Honours students, many of whom are current SETAC AU members and active in the ecotoxicology community. But even beyond his commitment to his students was a natural dedication to mentorship and a predisposition to help anybody that knocked on his door. Michael’s legacy will be felt for many years to come, and his body of work will continue to inspire new research. Personally, I’ll just miss having a glass of red wine with the man I called my friend.
Reiner Mann
