Wolf Dittus

Who is Wolf Dittus?

Wolfgang Peter Johann Dittus is a primatologist and behavioral ecologist based in Sri Lanka.

Born in Berlin, Germany, and brought up in the rural Black-Forest region Baden-Württemberg, Wolfgang ‘Wolf’ Dittus migrated to Canada in 1953, where he studied geology at McGill University. During this time, however, his interests shifted to psychology and zoology, his early research having been on the song patterns of cardinal birds, inspiring an interest in animal communication in general.

He was awarded a PhD by the University of Maryland in 1974, his doctoral dissertation having been on ‘The ecology and behavior of the toque monkey, Macaca sinica’, in pursuit of which he moved to Sri Lanka in 1968. This work was conducted largely at a research site established at Polonnaruwa under one of the Smithsonian Institution’s projects that commenced in Sri Lanka during the 1960s funded by the United States’ Public Law 480 ‘Food for Peace’ programme. With the phasing out of the Smithsonian’s association with this program in 1972, all but Dittus’ study on toque macaques came to an end. His PhD research contributed original and seminal discoveries in the fields of behavioral-ecology, population biology and social evolution of primates.