Born on 22nd December 1944 and married to Michèle (nee Conti), Dandria was from an early age interested in natural history, following in the footsteps of his brother Tony, who was one of the founders of the Malta Ornithological Society (now Birdlife Malta). In 1968 he was awarded a Government scholarship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology of London University where he graduated B. Sc. (Hons) in Zoology in 1971.
Dandria took up the post of Entomologist responsible for plant health in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, through which he acquired a deep knowledge of Malta’s insect fauna and also studied other crop pests. He worked with several foreign experts and co-authored a number of papers on the plant parasitic nematodes of Malta. In 1984, together with the late Prof. Franco Lamberti and Dr Angela Capussi he published an Atlas of Plant Parasitic Nematodes of the Maltese Islands which included 17 species, most of them new records for Malta.
In the 1990’s Dandria developed an interest in Malta’s spider fauna, a field of study which had previously been given scant attention. In 1993 he co-authored a paper on the spiders of the Maltese Islands, later updated in a publication he made in 2005 with a checklist of the spider species then known from Malta, up to a total of 137 species. In between these two works, his studies on Maltese spiders included the discovery of a species new to science, including the Maltese linyphiid spider, Palliduphanthes melitensis (= Lepthyphantes melitensis); and the rediscovery of the arboreal habitat of the endemic and protected Maltese trapdoor spider, Nemesia arboricola, which had for a long time been thought to be possibly extinct.
Dandria was also a part-time lecturer in the Department of Biology at the University of Malta and an Agricultural Adviser within the Ministry responsible for agriculture in the years leading to, and immediately after, Malta’s accession to the European Union. He edited the scientific peer-reviewed journal The Central Mediterranean Naturalist, from 1993 to 2012, and contributed the Chapter on Arachnida (spiders, scorpions and related animals) in the publication Flora u Fawna ta’ Malta. He later translated this popular work into English, Wildlife of the Maltese Islands. A devoted environmentalist, he was Chairman of the Natural Heritage Panel of the former Malta Environment and Planning Authority (2006-2013) and member of the Panel up to 2016. Dandria was also engaged as a Project Coordinator with EcoGozo (2011-2013), leading two EU projects AGRISLES and SIMBIOTIC.
Dandria is currently Museum Curator at the Department of Biology, University of Malta, and together with Prof. David Mifsud of the Institute of Earth Systems is working on the compilation of a complete checklist of Maltese arthropods comprising over 4,000 species.
