Lyall Watson (12 April 1939 – 25 June 2008) was a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author of many books, among the most popular of which is the best seller Supernature. Lyall Watson tried to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms. He is credited with coining the "hundredth monkey" effect in his 1979 book, Lifetide; later, in The Whole Earth Review, he conceded this was "a metaphor of my own making".
Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, full name Malcolm Lyall-Watson, he had an early fascination for nature in the surrounding bush and learned much from a Zulu minder, who taught him bushcraft and native African animism from an early age. Watson attended boarding school at Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town from the age of ten, completing his studies in 1955. He enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 16 where, by the time he was 20, he had earned degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and from the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal).
At the University of the Witwatersrand he had studied under Raymond Dart, leading on to postgraduate anthropological studies in Germany and the Netherlands. He completed a doctorate in ethology at the University of London, under Desmond Morris. He also worked at the BBC writing and producing nature documentaries, and for many years he spent seasons as an expedition leader and resident biologist on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading to the publication of a textbook for the general reader on Whales of the World in 1981. He was involved in setting up the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, and in 1977 was appointed as the Seychelles Commissioner for Whales.
Watson wrote twenty-four books in all, during a writing career which spanned four decades.
Life
Childhood (1939–55)
Born on 12 April 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Watson, born Malcolm Lyall-Watson, was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Doug Lyall-Watson, was an architect who served abroad during World War II with the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Douglas Lyall-Watson was of Scottish ancestry, although five generations removed from his Scottish roots. Watson's mother Mary was of Dutch South African heritage, descended from Simon van der Stel, the first Dutch governor of the Cape.
Watson spent his memorable childhood on his maternal grandparents' ranch in a corner of the Transvaal that borders Mozambique and Swaziland, where his mother Mary helped to run the large farm for her aging parents. His grandmother Ouma, Afrikaans for "old ma", English name Grace, was interviewed by the authorities once for defacing postage stamps; she was accustomed to drawing devil's horns on the portrait of the statesman who instigated apartheid, before posting her letters. Watson was often placed in the care of an elderly Zulu, the son of a tribal chief, who taught the inquisitive boy bush craft, gave him the nickname Mbuzi, meaning "The Goat" because of his delight in sampling and exploring everything, and impressed him with the animistic ideas of African tribal culture.
When his father returned from the war, Watson was already attending a local school at a neighbouring farm. His father's subsequent, itinerant lifestyle as an architect, and his mother's profession as a radiologist, kept Watson on his grandparents' farm until the age of ten, when he was sent to a boarding school in Cape Town. It was during summer breaks from Rondebosch Boys' High School, spending a month unsupervised with a dozen other boys from his local district on a beach in Plettenberg Bay, in the southeast corner of the Western Cape, that Watson developed his thirst to explore, and learned the independence of thought that stayed with him all his life. Already, at the age of nine, on his grandparents' farm, his grandmother had taken him to the chief of a local tribal community who had been a life-long friend of hers, to be initiated into adulthood with all the other boys of the village. By the time he went to boarding school, he was fluent in Afrikaans, English and Zulu.
Higher education (1955–60)
At Rondebosch Boys' High School Watson's academic progress caused him to jump over a year and consequently he finished his studies a year early, at the age of fifteen. His father allowed him to travel before starting at university, and the fifteen-year-old indulged a growing passion for elephants by visiting the only two areas in the southern Cape still to have them. At the age of sixteen he began his studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, one of four English language universities in South Africa at the time.
He initially intended to study medicine, and one of his tutors was Raymond Dart, who taught anatomy at the university but had worked extensively gathering fragments of fossil hominids, being the first to describe the genus Australopithecus. Watson volunteered to help sort a large collection of donated fossils for Dart, and the two struck up a friendship that would last until Dart's death in 1988.
Watson came to realize that his interests lay in zoology and anthropology rather than in medicine, and he completed his BSc degree at the University of the Witwatersrand having taken courses in a wide range of subjects including botany, zoology, geology, geography and even psychology. He gained his BSc(Hons) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in 1959, awarded in 1960.Finn Christensen, Alumni Relations Manager, University of KwaZulu-Natal. Email to Richard Scott-Robinson, 4 February 2026. Confirmation of BSc (Hons) awarded to Malcolm Lyall-Watson, home address in Johannesburg, in 1960, his studies completed in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal in 1959.
Doctoral research (1960–1963)
By now Watson had developed a fascination with animal behaviour, and following his graduation at the University of Natal in South Africa he travelled to Germany to offer his services to the renowned ethologist Konrad Lorenz. But the fishes Lorentz set him to study did not satisfy Watson's interest in larger mammals, so he moved to Holland to study anthropology and from there to England and to Oxford, where the Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen, now a British citizen, headed a research team studying animal behaviour at Oxford University. Watson was offered a place there as a doctoral student on a project studying black-headed gulls, which did not fill him with much enthusiasm either. One of Tinbergen's former postgraduate students, Desmond Morris, had recently become Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, and it was arranged that Watson should became Morris's first PhD student.
Watson was awarded his PhD in 1964, from Westfield College, University of London, later merged with Queen Mary College to become Queen Mary University of London.Sophia Benko, Senate House Library, University of London. Email to Richard Scott-Robinson, 29 January 2026. Confirmation of Lyall Watson's PhD thesis details (1964, Westfield College; title: 'The ethology of food-hoarding mammals - with special reference to the green acouchi, "Myoprocta pratti"'). The title of his thesis was 'The ethology of food-hoarding mammals - with special reference to the green acouchi, "Myoprocta pratti"' The green acouchi is a South American rodent found in the Amazon basin.
In order to support himself during his studies in London, Watson worked during the evenings in the kitchen of a large London hotel, rising to the grade of souffle chef. He met his first wife, Vivienne Mawson, when she interviewed him for a BBC Overseas Service radio programme on the activities of South African postgraduate students in London, and they were married in 1961. On the wedding cake was a sculpture of the Loch Ness monster. Shortly after gaining his doctorate, and given his experience at London Zoo and his association with Desmond Morris, he was offered the job of Director of Johannesburg Zoo in his native South Africa.
Johannesburg Zoo (1964–1965)
It was very soon after completing his PhD in London that Watson was offered the position of Director of the Johannesburg Zoo, an offer he found too good to refuse, despite his distaste for the apartheid system. He served as director there from 1964 to 1965. During this time, despite bureaucratic obstacles and financial constraints, he oversaw an expansion of the elephant house, introducing two companions for a long-time resident there, a female elephant named Delilah, as well as a new lion enclosure and a wooded area for the wolves. The 1960s was a time of general improvement at the zoo, introducing larger and more natural enclosures, the development of education and environmental programmes and involvement in local and international breeding programmes. Following completion of the new lion enclosure, however, as Watson describes in his 1982 BBC radio interview for Desert Island Discs, attempts by the local authorities to impose racial segregation on visitors to the new enclosures caused friction between himself and wider authorities leading to a number of interviews with the police and his ultimate resignation. He left South Africa and went to the Seychelles.
Tomorrow's World (1966–1967)
By the summer of 1966, Watson was in London again and he joined the production team on the BBC's tech television magazine programme Tomorrow's World, on the same day as its longstanding-co-presenter-to-be, James Burke. Watson, however, was only there for a year before moving on.
Watson's marriage to Vivienne ended in 1966. Around this time he shortened his name to Lyall Watson.
Seychelles and Indonesia (1967–1971 )
Following his departure from the BBC, Watson's life goes off the radar for a while. But there are clues. He tried freelance film-making, shooting underwater archaeology in Greece and Turkey. He set up a consultancy business specializing in zoo design and nature conservation, which he named BioLogic of London. He was already known in the Seychelles and was later to help set up wildlife conservation areas in the region. There is mention of him organizing safari tours in Kenya. There is a story of him building a wooden house in Mosambique, even melting sand to make glass, but it was abandoned before completion. Watson confesses in a 1982 BBC radio interview that he needed long periods spent alone. He was also writing his first book, based on his studies of biology and ethology, called Omnivore: Our Evolution in the Eating Game, published in January 1971.
In the summer of 1970 Watson worked as an expedition leader and scientist-in-residence for a travel company owned by Lars-Eric Lindblad, on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading onshore expeditions and giving lectures on board. Lindblad ran a travel company based in the USA offering worldwide adventure holidays to exotic and hitherto unvisited places. He was a keen conservationist and in 1971 was actively seeking new locations for his small new cruise ship the Lindblad Explorer to visit. Watson was recruited by him in the summer of 1971 to scout out locations to visit in the Seychelles and in the islands of Indonesia, as a commercial venture but also to raise awareness of the vulnerability of these places. Watson was approached because: "Not only did he have a vast knowledge of biology, but he had lived for some time in the Seychelles and Indonesia, and knew the islands and islanders well."
In his Desert Island Discs radio broadcast for the BBC, Watson mentions an MSc in Marine Biology as one of his degrees. Given his gravitation at this time towards the sea, as illustrated by his 1981 textbook Whales of the World, the fruit of ten years study on the Lindblad Explorer and elsewhere, it is possible that one of the years 1967 to 1969 may have been spent studying for this degree.
Supernature and the Lindblad Explorer (1971–1974)