Ernst Vanhöffen

Ernst Vanhöffen

Ernst Vanhöffen (born November 15, 1858 in Wehlau , East Prussia , † June 14, 1918 in Legitten , East Prussia) was a German zoologist and explorer.

Life

Ernst Vanhöffen was born as the second son of a grain dealer in Wehlau in East Prussia. After attending the Löbenicht secondary school , he studied natural sciences at the Albertus University in Königsberg from 1878 . In 1879 he became a member of the Corps Normannia Königsberg . He was honored three times as Consenior . In 1881 he moved to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin for a semester . He then served as a one-year volunteer . On returning to Königsberg , he turned to zoology under the influence of Richard von Hertwig and Carl Chun , but remained interested in geology and botany throughout his life .

In 1886 he passed his state examination as a senior teacher and became an assistant at the zoological institute on October 1. Two years later his doctorate he became Dr. phil. Equipped with a grant from the Prussian Ministry of Culture, he went to the Naples Zoological Station in the winter of 1889–1890 to continue his studies on jellyfish. After his return, Victor Hensen entrusted him with the processing of the umbrella jellyfish for the plankton expedition of 1889. Vanhöffen moved to the Zoological Institute of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel .

In 1892 he had the opportunity to take part in a larger research trip himself. The Geography Society led an expedition to West Greenland under the direction of Erich von Drygalski . A preparatory expedition had already taken place a year earlier. The main expedition should also be accompanied by a biologist. On May 1, 1892, Vanhöffen went in Copenhagen with the other participants on board the Danish sailing ship Peru , which brought the researchers to Uummannaq . Here at the 71st parallel, the expedition wintered and did not return home until October 14, 1893.

Vanhöffen stayed at the University of Kiel, whose zoological institute was well equipped with material thanks to the good connections between Hens and Karl Brandts and the German Sea Fisheries Association. When Friedrich Dahl made a trip to the Bismarck Archipelago from 1896 to 1897 , Vanhöffen was able to fill his assistant position at the institute. Then he went to the Zoological Museum in Berlin for six months . In 1896 he finally became an assistant in Kiel and completed his habilitation on May 18 at the university there.

When the German deep-sea expedition left the port of Hamburg on July 31, 1898 on the steamer Valdivia , Vanhöffen was on board at the request of the expedition leader Carl Chun. The nine-month trip led through the Atlantic to Antarctic waters and from there to the Indian Ocean . When editing the abundant yield of deep-sea organisms Vanhoffen took over the jellyfish .

Back in Kiel, he began teaching as a private lecturer at the university. On March 23, 1901, he was appointed professor.

After the Greenland expedition, Drygalski soon developed a plan for an expedition to Antarctica, which he shared with his friend Vanhöffen at an early stage. Already at the Geographersag in Bremen in April 1895 both presented the importance of such an enterprise in lectures, Drygalski from the geographical, Vanhöffen from the biological point of view. In 1899 it was decided to send the South Polar Expedition for 1901. In the summer of 1900, Vanhöffen made two trips to Denmark and Norway to order equipment for the expedition , advised by Fridtjof Nansen . On August 11, 1901, the research ship Gauß left Kiel for Kerguelen . Vanhöffen was the only biologist on board. He had a rich field of activity for the next 27 months. Apart from birds and mammals, little was known about the fauna of the Antarctic at that time. Of the twenty volumes with scientific results from the expedition, thirteen deal exclusively with biological subjects. In the seven volumes on zoology that appeared while Vanhöffen was still alive, 2,800 species were described, including over 1,000 new ones. He himself worked on the medusa, the woodlice and the hydroidea, an obsolete order of the cnidarians .

In 1906 August Brauer , the new director of the Zoological Museum in Berlin, appointed Vanhöffen as curator . He then looked after the crabs , the millipedes and the coelenterates , as well as the plankton collection and the collection of basic samples. After Brauer's death in 1917 he took over the publication of the scientific results of the Valdivia expedition and the office of secretary of the German Zoological Society .

He died at age 60 during his summer holiday in East Prussia at a pneumonia . The Cape Vanhoffen on the island in the Indian Ocean Heard bears his name.

Fonts (selection)

• Studies on semaeostome and rhizostome medusae.  - Internet Archive . Dissertation, Königsberg 1888 (= Bibliotheca zoologica 1889, volume 3).
• The acalephen of the plankton expedition. In: Victor Hensen (Ed.): Results Plankton Expedition. Volume 2, Part 1, 1902.
• The fauna and flora of Greenland. In: Erich von Drygalski (Ed.): Greenland expedition of the Society for Geography in Berlin 1891-1893. Volume 2, part 1, Kühl, Berlin 1897 ( archive.org ).
• The acrasped medusa. In: Carl Chun (Hrsg.): Scientific results of the German deep-sea expedition on the steamer "Valdivia" 1898–1899. Volume 3, part 1. Fischer, Jena 1902, pp. 1-52 ( archive.org ).
• The craspedote medusa. I. Trachymedus. In: Carl Chun (Hrsg.): Scientific results of the German deep-sea expedition on the steamer "Valdivia" 1898–1899. Volume 3, part 1. Fischer, Jena 1902, pp. 53–86 ( archive.org ).
• The isopods of the German South Polar Expedition 1901–1903. In: Erich von Drygalski (Ed.): Deutsche Südpolar-Expedition 1901–1903. Volume 15, Reimer, Berlin 1914 ( archive.org ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, "90", 24.
2. ↑ Dissertation: Investigations into semaeostome and rhizostome medusa
3. ^ Friedrich Volbehr and Richard Weyl: Professors and lecturers at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 1665 to 1915. Schmidt and Klaunig, Kiel 1916, p. 158.

literature

• Hans Lohmann : Ernst Vanhöffen . In: Communications from the Zoological Museum Berlin . tape 9 , 1918, ISSN  0373-8493 , p. 71-90 ( archive.org ).
• Erich von Drygalski: To the continent of the icy south . German south polar expedition. Journeys and research by the "Gauss" 1901–1903. Reimer, Berlin 1904.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Vanhöffen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ernst Vanhöffen in the catalog of the German National Library