Commentary |
Corresponding author: Michael Ohl ( michael.ohl@mfn-berlin.de ) Academic editor: Ben Price
© 2016 Michael Ohl.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Ohl M (2016) Horst Aspöck, encyclopedist and entomologist extraordinaire – a personal appreciation. ZooKeys 555: 137-151. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.555.7410
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The paper provides an overview of the life and work of Prof. Dr. Horst Aspöck, the doyen of neuropterology, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. It particularly emphasizes his outstanding contributions to the development of neuropterology since the 1960s.
Biography, Neuropterida , Raphidioptera , Neuroptera , Megaloptera , history of science
This is a note on one of the most outstanding and productive entomologists of our time. It is not meant to be an exhaustive account of Horst Aspöck’s career and achievements over the 75 years of his life so far. My knowledge of Horst is somewhat limited to his entomological, historical and linguistic activities and stems mostly from my professional and personal relationship with him over the last ten years. Numerous biographical essays on Horst have been published on various occasions and from different perspectives, and it is certainly advisable to read them for a more complete picture of Horst than I can provide here (e.g.,
Writing such a paper about Horst’s personal life and scientific work with a significant biographical and entomological focus is a challenge not only because of the sheer amount of potentially relevant material, but also because Horst’s academic work in entomology is inextricably intermingled with the life, scientific work and career of his wife Ulrike. In 1964, they began to work and publish together on Neuropterida, and most of their publications on Neuropterida published since then are coauthored by the Aspöcks together, often with additional coauthors. Trying to carve out Horst’s many achievements is often hardly possible, since most of them were actually Horst’s and Ulrike’s combined achievements. However, since this paper is written in honor of Horst’s 75th birthday, I try to follow his personal tracks over time, but I am aware that Ulrike’s and his life and work are too closely connected to do that consistently. Horst himself has worked out their close and intimate life-long collaboration in a paper published on the occasion of her 70th birthday (
Horst was born on 21 July 1939 in Budweis (České Budějovice) in former Czechoslovakian and now Czech Bohemia. At the time of his birth, Czechoslovakia has already been annexed by the German Reich, and as late as early 1945, the World War also arrived in Budweis. Until May 1945, Bohemia and Moravia were the very last war zones of World War II in Europe, until the German Armed Forces capitulated on 8 May 1945. Local inhabitants of German origin had to suffer severe retaliations, and according to the Potsdam Agreement from 1945, all Germans were expelled from the Sudetenland region. Horst’s mother, Maria (“Manka”) Knapp, was of Austrian nationality, because she was married to the Austrian-born Fritz Aspöck, from whom she had already divorced in 1941. In the fall of 1945, the Aspöck family moved to Linz in the Austrian state of Upper Austria.
Horst lived in Linz with his family until 1957, when he enrolled at the University of Innsbruck to study Biology with a Zoology major. On the 12th July 1962, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Innsbruck with a thesis on the toxicological characteristics of carbamates. Shortly after, Horst became a student assistant at the Institute of Hygiene of the University of Vienna, and he continued working at this very same university until his retirement in 2004. In January 1963, he became research assistant, and in 1966, he was commissioned to establish and lead a new department of medical parasitology at the Institute of Hygiene of the University of Vienna. In 1970, he received his habilitation and was promoted to “Universitätsdozent” for medical parasitology. In 1977, Horst was promoted to extraordinary Professor and in 2000 to full university professor for medical parasitology. He worked as the head of the department of medical parasitology at the same institute, until he retired in September 2004. Since retirement he has continued duties in academic teaching and research and in the supervision of students. Over the years, he has received numerous awards and became honorary or corresponding member in several national and international societies. He is a member of the Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina since 2000 and a member of the Human-Rights-Committee of the Leopoldina since 2003.
In 1963, Horst married Ulrike Pirklbauer, who is better known as Ulrike Aspöck in entomology. They have one son, Christoph, born in 1965.
Horst Aspöck, developmental stages and as a gentleman and professor. 1 around 1950 in Linz, Upper Austria 2 In 1961, passport photo 3 In 1963, Prague, Czechoslovakia, during a symposium on “Theoretical questions of Natural Focis of Diseases” 4 In 1970, Igls near Innsbruck, Austria, during a conference of the German-speaking society for tropical medicine 5 In 1973, in Vienna, Austria, as enthusiastic dancers on a ball at the Wiener Konzerthaus 6 2004, in the Festsaal of the University of Vienna. With vice rector Hans Geord Eichler (left), during the first PhD defense of the Medical University Vienna (previously Medical Faculty of the University Vienna), held in Latin language, as still mandatory in Austria 7 In 2014, in Linz, Austria, with Ulrike, during the 81st International Entomologist’s Conference. All photos from the Aspöck photo archive.
As early as 1952, at the age of 13, Horst became a member of the “Entomologische Arbeitsgemeinschaft” at the “Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum”. Getting in close contact with experienced and enthusiastic entomologists was quite influential, and only four years later, in 1956, he joined an entomological field trip to Istria. He regularly gave private lessons in order to cover the costs of his entomological activities. From the very early beginning, he also showed a disposition to classical languages and to linguistic subtleties, which largely influenced his writing and his taxonomic work until today. During his university studies in Innsbruck, Horst continued his entomological activities, amongst others by temporary work at the “Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control” in Delémont, Switzerland. Although he had already developed some interest in lacewings during the field trip to Istria, he started to work systematically on Neuroptera in 1960 (
Horst Aspöck in the field. 8 In 1975, Anatolia, Turkey. During a collecting trip in the Pontus-mountains to collect Raphidioptera (photo by Hubert Rausch) 9 In 1975, Doĝubayazit, Anatolia, Turkey. Horst, flanked by Ulrike Aspöck (left) and Renate Rausch, dancing with locals 10 In 1971, Catalonia, Spain. From left: Ernst Hüttinger, Horst, Ulrike 11 In May 2014, Anti-Atlas, Morocco, Horst night-collecting 12 In 1995, Talasskaya Oblast, Talasskiy Alatau, Kyrgyztan. Horst collecting larvae of Raphidioptera13 In 2014, Anti-Atlas, between Tafraoute and the Igmir Oasis, with Ulrike 14 In 2000, Mae Hong Son Pai Province, Thailand, night-collecting with the Austrian entomologist Hans Malicky. All photos except for photo 8 from the Aspöck photo archive.
I have only limited knowledge about Horst’s research activities in medical parasitology, but these have been presented and cherished in several papers by more competent authors, including
Horst is unusually productive, and the “Aspöck-and-Aspöck” publication list comprises 739 publications until 2014, including more than ten books and numerous book chapters (
Some of the publications, particularly some books, are clearly milestones in their field and proved to be influential for generations of neuropterologists. Two particularly outstanding examples are the “big green books”, as a reference to the color of their book cover, “Die Neuropteren Europas” (The Neuropterans of Europe,
Although the Aspöcks are especially influential in Raphidioptera research, they have published intensively on virtually all families in Neuroptera, with a specific interest in Berothidae (e.g.,
Horst has published intensively in collaboration with his wife Ulrike, and the enormous number of publications with both Aspöcks as authors is remarkable. Only between 2009 and 2014, 71 of a total of 88 publications have been co-authored by both of them (
The multi-authored publication by
Horst has always grounded his empirical work on a fundamental understanding of the historical development of the discipline. He has published repeatedly on the history of neuropterology, including detailed and often personal appreciations of deceased colleagues, like the almost 90-pages-obituary for Herbert Hölzel (
Besides the many obituaries and personal biographies, Horst has intensively published on the history of neuropterology in Austria (
Horst Aspöck among colleagues and friends. 15 In 2013, group photo of the 13th workshop of the German-speaking neuropterologists on Schwanberg Castle, Bavaria, Germany. From left: Johannes Gepp, Melitta Fuchs, Lukas Kirschey, Karl Meissner, Horst and Ulrike, Wilfried Wichard and his wife, Steffen Potel, and Axel Gruppe 16 In 2014, same meeting, with Hubert Rausch and Michael Ohl (from left) 17 In 2011, Berlin, Germany. Annul meeting of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für allgemeine und angewandte Entomologie (DGaaE), with Ernst Joachim Tröger and Rainer Willmann (from left) 18 In 2011, same conference, with John Oswald (right) 19 In 2014, Vienna, Austria, with Fritz Gusenleitner (right) 20 In 2011, Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal. XI International Symposium on Neuropterology, with a group of Chinese neuropterologists. From left: Yongjie Wang, Horst, Xingyue Liu, and Dong Ren.
Horst had a profound education in classical languages, particularly in Latin, and he has developed a good sense for the subtleties of his own mother tongue. In his German publications, Horst develops a complex language, which is not only scientifically accurate and detailed, but also a delight to read. It seems to be logical, at least from my perspective, that Horst has thought about the linguistic background in general and for his science since very early on. This can best seen in the wide variety of taxon names he proposed in Neuropterida, which clearly exhibit a deep understanding of classic languages, combined with careful observation and a sense of humor and fantasy. The etymological origin of all names in Raphidioptera published by him and Ulrike has been presented in a long paper on the etymology of all names in Raphidioptera (
In the title of this contribution, Horst has been called an “encyclopedist”, and I am well aware that this term has a somewhat old-fashioned connotation. However, his approach in a sense of broadly compiling data and information is encyclopedic both in a historical and a completely modern sense. “Encyclopedist” is truly an historical word, and it derives from a time at least back to the 18th century, when formal biological nomenclature originated from the work of a true encyclopedist, Carl Linnaeus. Since 1758, the year of the publication of the 10th edition of Linnaeus’ “Systema Naturae”, which has been assigned the birth of zoological nomenclature, taxonomists have struggled hard to catalog and register all life on Earth. In a sense, the backbone of Horst’s work lies in the direct tradition of the “Linnaean enterprise” of a global register of all living forms (
This is how I perceived Horst and Ulrike Aspöck, when I first met Ulrike in mid-1994 in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Shortly before I had started to work on my dissertation on apoid wasp taxonomy and phylogeny under the supervision of Rainer Willmann at the University of Göttingen, Germany (Fig.
In the following years, I met Horst on various occasions on entomological meetings and conferences, and his personal appearance always inspired me respect. He was, and still is, always critically listening to presentations, even from students giving their first talk, and he very often asks the very first question during the discussion. We first got into a closer contact, when I started to work on Mantispidae within Neuroptera in the late 1990. I was appointed as curator for Neuropterida at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin in 1997, and soon after I decided to complement my interest in Hymenoptera by setting up a new, initially smaller project line on Neuroptera. Mantispidae was an attractive group, not only because of its intriguing morphology and behavior, but also because the diversity was limited, with about 350 valid species known, in contrast to the more than 10,000 species of apoid wasps I was confronted with for many years. Even more, after reading through the relevant literature and after talking to the Aspöcks and other neuropterologists, it became clear that at that time, there was nobody seriously working on the taxonomy and systematics of the Mantispidae with a global perspective. As a first step, I started to compile a personal catalog of all taxonomic names, which can be assigned to Mantispidae. I talked to Horst and Ulrike Aspöck frequently about the catalog, and Horst was always curious to learn about the progress I was making. My conversation with him about Mantispidae was usually accompanied by some kind of “examination” of my knowledge mostly about historical literature on Mantispidae, and in the first years, I was always nervous not to reveal too many painful and embarrassing knowledge gaps. However, I not only learned a lot from talking to Horst, but I very much enjoyed discussing with him topics of mutual interests. My “personal mantispid catalog” was finally published a few years later (
Over the last decade, I met Horst regularly on the meetings of the “Arbeitskreis Neuropteren” (http://www.dgaae.de/index.php/neuroptera.html), formerly the “Arbeitstreffen deutschprachiger Neuropterologen” (Figs
Besides Neuroptera, Horst and I have a great deal in common, and two particular interests we share are the linguistics and etymology of taxonomic names and the history of entomology, not to speak of neuropterology. Ulrike’s and his monographic treatment of the etymology of names in Raphidioptera (
The celebration of Horst’s 75th birthday is the perfect opportunity to look back to his many accomplishments. It is obvious from the above that Horst has a fearsome intellect and exhibits boundless dedication. He is working hard in pursuit of his exceedingly broad passion, and he is not slowing down significantly. He is a real gentleman, both personally and as a scientist, and he is very thoughtful of the needs of friends and colleagues. He is much sought as a collaborator, first because of his broad knowledge in so many fields, but also because he has the focus and concentration to bring projects to a success. I admire his continuing energy, his productivity and his drive. He is setting a high standard for the younger generation, including me, and although I am not always sure that I am able to meet these standards myself, I can call myself very fortunate to benefit from extensive interactions with Horst in so many respects. We are all looking forward to much more to come.
Ulrike Aspöck supplied the photographs, which have contributed significantly to the manuscript. I thank Ben Price, who checked and improved the manuscript linguistically.