As director of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park for a period of 16 years from 1984, Michael Robinson transformed the national zoo from being a conventional arrangement of pens and cages to a “biopark” where the animals could live in an environment approximating as closely as possible to their natural habitat, at the same time providing an education for the public on what they were seeing.

It was an approach which at first drew criticism from some traditionalists, who maintained that the primary function of this venerable institution, founded by an Act of Congress in 1889, was to provide the public with the best possible view of the zoo's resident species. In fact, Robinson's intentions were quite at one with the zoo's original purposes - “the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people” - and he used the substantial government budget available to him to expand and diversify this brief.

Among innovations that flourished under his aegis were an exhibit on animal thinking, a spider exhibition and a pollinarium where visitors could study the interaction between animals and plants. Today the zoo is home to 2,000 animals representing almost 400 species. A spider specialist himself, the British-born Robinson had spent 18 years in the field studying animal behaviour before going to Washington.

Michael Hill Robinson was born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1929. His interest in animals stemmed from his father's running a pet shop. At the age of 12 he acquired an aquarium and began to breed tropical fish, studying their habits and behaviour closely.

He wanted to be a biologist but his father died during the Second World War and instead he was apprenticed to a bricklayer when he left school. National Service in the RAF, in which he served as a medical orderly, rescued him from a life of manual labour, enabling him to broaden his horizons and go on a teacher training course.

For a while he taught school science, and became senior science master at Camborne Grammar School, in Cornwall. Then, supported by his wife Barbara, he was able, at the age of 30, to read for a degree in biology at University College Swansea. Graduating with a first in 1963, he went to Oxford where he studied under Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Dutch authority on animal behaviour, and took his DPhil, specialising in tropical insects, in 1966.

This led to his appointment in that year as a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. There, and in travels that took him to Ghana, Kenya, Sri Lanka, India, Papua New Guinea and South America, he spent the next 18 years working as an animal behaviourist, specialising in predator-prey relationships in insects and arachnids.

On appointment to the National Zoological Park in 1984 he set out on a programme of visits to all the major zoos in the US. With his innovative presentations he became a familiar figure on American television, his gospel being that “zoos are probably the most important force in informal education that we can muster”.

In retirement from the national zoo in 2001 he returned to Panama to study orb-weaving spiders and reef squid, thereafter keeping up his interest in animal behaviour at his Florida home. Latterly he had moved back to the Washington area. Among his books were Ecology and Behaviour of the Giant Wood Spider Nephila Maculata (Fabricius) in New Guinea (1973), with Barbara Robinson and Zoo Animals: A Smithsonian Guide (1995), with David Challinor and Holly Webber.

There were no children of his marriage to Barbara, which was dissolved.

Michael Robinson, director of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Washington, 1984-2000, was born on January 7, 1929. He died of cancer on March 22, 2008, aged 79