Reginald Crundall Punnett FRS (/ˈpʌnɪt/; 20 June 1875 – 3 January 1967)[1][2][3][4][5] was a British geneticist who co-founded, with William Bateson, the Journal of Genetics in 1910.

In October 1901, Punnett was back at Cambridge when he was elected to a Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College,[8] working in zoology, primarily the study of worms, specifically nemerteans.

[12] In 1908, unable to explain how a dominant allele would not become fixed and ubiquitous in a population, Punnett introduced one of his problems to the mathematician G. H. Hardy, with whom he played cricket.

[13] In 1909 he went to Sri Lanka to meet Arthur Willey, FRS, then Director of the Colombo Museum and R H Lock, then Scientific Assistant at the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens and to catch butterflies.

Since only females were used for egg-production, early identification of male chicks, which were destroyed or separated for fattening, meant that limited animal-feed and other resources could be used more efficiently.