Martin Humphrey Moynihan (5 February 1928 - 3 December 1996) was an influential behavioral evolutionary biologist and ornithologist who studied under Ernst Mayr and Niko Tinbergen, and was a contemporary of Desmond Morris and various other famous ethologists. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.[1]
His early research was mainly on seagulls as they were ubiquitous and easy to observe. Later work included even the octopus, and Terence McKenna quotes Moynihan in his book "Food of the Gods" as saying, with respect to this creature's remarkable ability to change its body's shape, texture and color, "Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts."
He was married to Olga F. Linares, the noted Panamanian-American anthropologist and STRI senior research scientist.
Moynihan died in Albi, France in 1996 of lung cancer, aged 68.[2]