Densey Clyne

Densey Clyne (born Dorothy Denise Bell, 4 December 1922) is an Australian naturalist, photographer and writer, especially well known for her studies of spiders and insects. She was born in Risca, Wales, United Kingdom, and moved to Australia in 1936. During World War II she served as a commissioned officer in the Australian Women's Army Service, after a year in the Land Army. She married Peter Clyne (1927–1987) in 1950. Clyne lives in Wauchope, New South Wales.

As a naturalist, conservationist and communicator, Clyne has written 30 books on natural history subjects, in particular on insects and spiders (see list below). She has written scripts for her own and other television documentaries on natural history, and published numerous papers and articles dealing with invertebrate lives and behaviour in professional journals and popular magazines. She delivered talks and addresses on invertebrate behaviour and the pleasures of insect-watching to schools, adult groups, and professional organisations. She has also taken part in seminars on natural history writing and on wildlife filming, and also acted as a consultant on local wildlife for Australian and overseas television film productions, including several of Sir David Attenborough's natural history series. She has also served as a juror at Japan's Environmental Film Festival (1995), and presented regular natural history segments for eight years on Channel 9's Burke's Backyard lifestyle show. Densey Clyne is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of London.

For her contributions to arachnology Densey Clyne has had two new species of spider named for her.

Clyne has written several regular columns on natural history for the print media for:

Clyne's scientific contributions include the first detailed description of the netmaking behaviour and sperm induction of the spider Dinopis subrufa, (Australian Zoologist, 1967); the web structure of the spider Poecilopachys bispinosa (Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, 1973); and a joint paper with D. Rentz, CSIRO Insect Division, on Anthophiloptera dryas, a new orthopteran genus and species, studied and recorded over several years by Clyne in her Sydney garden (Journal of the Australian Entomological Society, 1983).

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