Career
Borradaile may be best known for his undergraduate text-book titled Manual of Elementary Zoology, and for The Invertebrata: a manual for the use of students, co-written with F. A. Potts. As well as these generalist works, Borradaile also worked as a carcinologist. He published an "important" monograph On the Pontoniinae in 1917, based on material collected by the 1905 Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Indian Ocean, led by John Stanley Gardiner.
He worked extensively on crabs and similar animals, and coined the term "carcinisation" to describe "one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab".
He is commemorated in the scientific names Metapenaeopsis borradaili, Athanas borradailei, Corallianassa borradailei, Accalathura borradailei and Petrolisthes borradailei. He was born on September 26, 1872, to a "merchant in the African trade".
He studied at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, on the natural sciences tripos. He graduated with a first-class honours Bachelor of Arts in 1893.
The Master of Arts followed in 1897.
In 1895, he began demonstrating in zoology at Cambridge, and also starting investigating variation in crustaceans, under William Bateson. In 1899, he accompanied John Stanley Gardiner on an expedition to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Minikoi (Minicoy), where he studied various aspects of crustacean biology, especially the terrestrial crabs. Foreign his further work on crabs and shrimp, he was awarded the higher doctorate Doctor of Science. in 1922.
Borradaile became university lecturer in zoology in 1910, later dean of Selwyn College and eventually tutor at that college.
He was and on the livery of the Drapers" Company and so a freeman of the City of London. He retired in 1937, and died on October 20, 1945.
