He has hitched a ride on the back of the biggest fish in the world but, in a career devoted to the study of the Earth?s myriad life-forms, Bermuda Natural History Museum?s just retired curator Wolfgang Sterrer?s number one favourite has been ?the little critters that live between the grains of sand.?

For the past 36 years Dr. Sterrer has been based in Bermuda, devoting himself to expanding man?s knowledge of the world around us, and in particular this Island?s amazing self-contained micro-environment.

Bermuda has been good for him, and he has been more than good for Bermuda. His work here has been split almost exactly in half between a director?s post at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research from 1969 to 1986 and then to the natural history curator post from 1987 until this month when his 65th birthday brought enforced retirement.

In the process he has written a number of books, one of the most recent about Bermuda?s seashore plants and seaweeds features a picture of him scuba diving and catching a piggy-back ride on a huge whale shark.

As he sat in his upstairs office at the Aquarium and Zoo in Flatts, surrounded by a lifetime?s worth of books, research papers and other collected odds and ends soon to make way for the next curator, there is an inescapable sense that here is a man who truly found his professional joy in life and pursued it unencumbered.

For him every day held the promise of a new discovery, a new insight into his lifelong fascination with nature.

How could Dr. Sterrer be anything but satisfied that he managed to stay at the ?coalface? working as a researcher and curator all his life?

He has avoided the pitfalls of so many in the science field who, all too easily, become entangled in management posts that rob them of the opportunities to continue to ?go out in the field? and do what is their first love.

Dr. Sterrer recognises that, and says his desire to be a researcher first and foremost was what let him to the curator post at the museum.

?I always wanted to have a position where I could carry on doing research and not get absorbed with management, which nowadays is such a danger, where you become a manager, a fundraiser, a public relations person,? he explained.

Having studied zoology and palaeontology in his native Austria, he arrived in Bermuda at the end of the 1960s as director of the BBSR, becoming a citizen of Bermuda ten years later.

He always wanted to remain first and foremost a researcher and switching to the museum curator post ensured that he could continue his life-long study of microscopic marine life, what he calls ?the little critters?.

Collecting buckets of sand and then ?extracting the little creatures alive and placing them under a microscope and keeping them alive? has made Dr. Sterrer a leading authority in the field and many of his near 100 research publications have dealt with these discoveries.

But he has also studied the many and varied types of sealife to be found in and around Bermuda, and further afield, as well as land species from insects, animals and birds to plants and trees.

In the course of all this he has written and edited six books, including the comprehensive ?Marine Fauna and Flora of Bermuda?, ?Bermuda?s Delicate Balance? and the companion books ?Bermuda?s Marine Life? and ?Bermuda?s Seashore Plants and Seaweeds?. The latter two books are sold in the Aquarium shop, and Dr. Sterrer intends to write a third volume focusing on Bermuda?s land species as one of his retirement projects.

He considers himself fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend so much of his career researching Bermuda. The Island habitat means there is a clearly defined cut-off point linked to its limited geographical boundaries. As one of the world?s remotest and smallest inhabited islands, Bermuda presents a fascinating biology, according to Dr. Sterrer.

?Islands have been called living laboratories because on an island you can see what is going on in an ecology, in the bigger ocean there are so many variables, but not on an island,? he said.

Bermuda has a surprisingly stable coral reefs and near-shore marine environment, but that is something that no one should take for granted, warns Dr. Sterrer, who remembers the tar pollution that marred the beaches in the 1970s before the culprits ? passing tankers ? were identified.

He added: ?The quality of the inshore waters here is very good. I became fascinated to see the cause and effect of everything that we do as an Island. We can see where things go. Nothing is out of sight on an Island. If you throw some garbage out into the sea it ends up coming back on to the beach.?

Bermuda is learning about the effect of economic growth on its fragile environment. It is something Dr. Sterrer says can be traced back to the earliest settlers to the Island who started destroying their surroundings, which at the time was a heavily wooded land and not much else, so quickly that they realised they needed to stop or they would end up destroying everything the Island had to offer.

The Cahow seabird, found nowhere else in the world, barely clings to survival in a tiny corner of Bermuda as a result of the actions of past generations.

Dr. Sterrer said: ?The positive thing is that we are planning much more and a lot is being translated into legislation. Bermuda?s schoolchildren are now learning so much more about Bermuda. The Bermuda Zoological Society has helped to rewrite the curriculum so children learn about the Bermudian environment rather than the English environment.

?And so many more people are aware that every step forward the economy makes, nature is being pushed one step back towards the wall.?

Looking ahead, Dr. Sterrer welcomes the Government?s proposal to turn the Cooper?s Island peninsula into a nature reserve and national park.

But he would like to add his own radical tweak to the plan by cutting off the causeway link to Cooper?s Island and making it a true island as it once was before the Second World War.

Visitors should have to ?wade out? or perhaps ride a boat to reach the reserve. In doing so this relatively unspoilt corner of Bermuda will have a better chance of remaining a sanctuary for native creatures and plants, protected somewhat from invasive species such as rats, cats and dogs.

?The most difficult thing is keeping native species safe from invasive species,? said Dr. Sterrer.

No successor as curator of the natural history museum has yet been named.

Dr. Sterrer will continue to play a role, albeit now as a research associate, at the museum, and intends to continue his research into ?microscopic things? while also playing an ongoing part in the Bermuda Diversity Project.