Gustav Albert Stiasny

Gustav Albert Stiasny (born December 10, 1877 in Vienna , Austria ; † June 12, 1946 in Leiden , Netherlands ) was a Dutch zoologist of Austrian origin. His research focus was marine biology .

Live and act

After attending elementary school and high school, Stiasny volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army . After a year he left the army and worked in his father's trading company. Influenced by Ernst Haeckel , Karl Grobben and Berthold Hatschek , Stiasny developed an interest in zoology and studied in Vienna and Jena . In 1903 he received his doctorate from the University of Vienna .

He then traveled the North Atlantic waters with the research ship “ Michael Sars ”. On this expedition he made the acquaintance of marine researchers Jakob Johan Adolf Appellöff (1857–1921), Bjørn Helland-Hansen (1877–1957), Johan Hjort (1869–1948) and Haakon Hasberg Gran (1870–1955). In 1906 Stiasny took part in an expedition from the University of Vienna to the west coast of Greenland . He then worked until 1912 as an assistant to Professor Carl Isidor Cori (1865–1954) at the former biological marine station in Trieste . During his time with Cori, he undertook expeditions to the Mediterranean , the Azores , the Canary Islands , Argentina , Uruguay and Brazil .

In 1912 he worked as a primary school teacher in Vienna. A year later he became head of the research department for plankton and fisheries at the Naples Zoological Station . During the First World War he served in Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia.

In 1915 Stiasny married the Dutch zoologist Gerarda Wijnhoff. In 1919 he became curator for marine invertebrates at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (now Naturalis ) in Leiden. In 1925 Stiasny became a Dutch citizen . In 1929 he was deputy director of the zoological station of the Nederlandsche Dierkundige Vereeniging (zoological station of the Netherlands Zoological Association) in Den Helder . Shortly afterwards he became a lecturer at the University of Leiden .

When the National Socialists invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Stiasny, who was Jewish, had to leave the museum. However, he was able to continue his systematic and biogeographical research with difficulties.

Stiasny provided important information about the larvae of acorn worms in the Mediterranean. As a curator in Leiden, he wrote revisions on several groups of marine invertebrates, especially the umbrella jellyfish . In addition to numerous cnidarians taxa , Stiasny described the genera Punnettia , Paradrepanophorus , Mastigietta , Acromitoides and Crambionella .

Dedication names

In 1938 Henry Bryant Bigelow named the box jellyfish Manokia stiasnyi from the waters of New Guinea in honor of Gustav Albert Stiasny. Other taxa are Tornaria stiasnyi (Bjornberg 1954) and Wrightella stiasnyi (Van Ofwegen 1989).

Works (selection)

• 1913: The plankton of the sea
• 1921: Studies on rhizostomes with special consideration of the fauna of the Malay Archipelago and a revision of the system
• 1925: On the development and phylogeny of the Catostylidae
• 1927: Die Tornarie: Critique of the descriptions and comparison of all known enteropneusten larvae
• 1934: About some exotic tornaries
• 1936: Gorgonaria from Cap Blanco (West Africa, Mauritania)
• 1935–37: The Gorgonacea of ​​the Siboga expedition . Supplement 1-2
• 1937: Revision of the Scleraxonia, excluding the Melitodidae and Coralliidae
• 1938: Dr. C. Dawydoff collected Gorgonaries in French Indochina
• 1938: The Scyphomeduses of the Red Sea
• 1940: Alcyonaria and Gorgonaria of South Africa: from the collection of the South African Museum, Capetown

literature

• W. Verwoort: Gustav Albert Stiasny (obituary). In: Zoologische Mededelingen. No. January 16, 19, 1950. Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie, Leiden. On-line

Web links

• Literature by and about Gustav Albert Stiasny in the catalog of the German National Library