Jacques Géry

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Jacques Géry (* 1917 in Paris , France , † June 15, 2007 in Sarlat , France), Doctor of Medicine , was a French ichthyologist and scientist .

Life

He studied medicine in Strasbourg and worked at the Hôpitaux de Strasbourg at the age of 20, and later worked as an internist in Clairvivre ( Dordogne ). Shortly after the end of the Second World War, forcibly stationed in Germany to look after English prisoners of war, he met the pioneer of modern discus breeding , Eduard Schmidt (later Schmidt-Focke ), also a doctor at Aquarium Hamburg. Jacques Géry became Chef de Clinique ajoint at the Faculté de Médicine de Strasbourg in 1947 and completed his Thése de Médicine there on July 20, 1947. He then worked as a recognized plastic surgeon until 1960 in the Clinic des Mines in Briey , Department Meurthe-et -Moselle .

During this activity his main interest, the ornamental fish , never let him go. He was already keeping fish at the age of 13. From 1951 on, he published uninterrupted works on aquariums, fish and plants - for beginners as well as advanced. By 1958, there were 72 articles that had appeared in popular magazines and books.

His first publication on fish was called: Les Mollienisia, description, moeurs, reproduction and appeared in L'Aquarium & les Poissons, in the magazine of which he was editor-in-chief until 1957. He wrote about labyrinth fish , barbel , glass perch , carp-like and gobies , rainbow fish , Loaches , catfish , viviparous tooth carps , puffer fish , as well as killifish and cichlids including aquarium plants as well as about the biology and mimesis of fish. However, his preference clearly belonged to the tetras . In 1952 he made his first popular work on it. He wrote extensively about Hyphessobrycon flammeus (Myers, 1924), which he had cultivated and bred before the war. 1953 followed a longer publication on the nannostominae . A year later he brought out the first major work on the Pyrrhulininae , followed in the same year by a detailed treatise on the neon tetra ( P. innesi ). He dealt with the African tetras from 1954 ( Phenacogrammus ) and even more intensively after his first Guinea expedition in the following year and in 1956. He made over ten trips to the Amazon and conducted research at various institutes ( São Paulo , Manaus , Cuiabá , Trindade , Lima and Kourou ), as well as in nature. Despite not having traveled a lot, he knew the Amazon better than anyone and was able to help any (Brazilian) scientist, or any other researcher in South America. He knew every tetra caught, whether animals from La Condamine , Löfling , Ferreira, Humboldt , Spix & Martius , Natterer , Langsdorff , Adalbert (Prince Heinrich Wilhelm), those of the Schomburgk brothers or Wallace , and of course the specimens of the Thayer expedition with Agassiz , the largest of all collections in the Amazon, or Steindachner's fish.

His first scientific publications appeared in 1959 when he created the genus Roeboexodon gen. N. De Guyane and shortly thereafter described Thayeria ifati (Géry, 1959). At the age of 44, because he now valued fish more than medicine (increasingly aversion to plastic operations and his friend, the leading zoologist in France, said to him: “A surgeon, a doctor, that's nothing”) he became again Student and doctorate in a thesis on the saw tetra of Guyana and attached a second thesis, a literature work on the repellants of cyprinids . In 1960 he published his last scientific medical paper, on which he had been working since 1941, and devoted the rest of his life to describing tetras. He worked intensively with other well-known ornamental fish experts, such as Heiko Bleher on the genus Symphysodon . During his stay in Gabon (1964), he collected over 5000 specimens of all fish groups in the region of the Ivindo River , where near Makokou Pierre P. Grassé had set up a laboratory for CNRS.

One of his last works (end of 2006) will be published soon (together with Zarske). It is the fourth neon fish that is presented to the world for the first time in the magazine Aquaristik Fachmagazin No. 196 . This publication was particularly important to him, because he is responsible for half of the species descriptions of the most famous ornamental and aquarium fish on earth , in addition to the genus ( Paracheirodon Géry, 1960 - for H. innesi ).

Jacques Géry rarely agreed with the cladists and even less with splinters or scientists who too quickly describe a new species, genus or family. And was against the description of unprofessional aquarists ("unskilled aquarists", as he called them). That is why he recommended Heiko Bleher in 1990, together with Friedhelm Krupp (today's Scientific Editor of aqua), to create an extraordinary scientific journal. He worked on its development right from the start and was a member of the editorial board - from day one. Thanks to his tireless efforts, aqua, Journal of Ichthyology and Aquatic Biology (since volume 12: aqua, International Journal of Ichthyology ) has become one of the world's leading scientific ichthyology journals. He published many works in it, including a. the pioneering review of the little-known African tetra group of the subfamily Alestinae (Géry, 1995).

Jacques Géry was always very careful and extremely thorough in his method of re-describing (he researched the species Hemigrammus bleheri (Géry & Mahnert, 1987) for almost 20 years). He could not finish his work on the tetras of what is certainly the most species-rich (smaller) river system on earth, the Rio Guaporé , on which he has worked for over 15 years, written around 350 pages and recorded almost 200 species of tetras (20 of which are new) bring.

His book Characoids of the world is still considered the standard work on this order. He has described hundreds of species anew, although his name has become immortal not only with the genus Geryichthys (Zarske, 1997) and the many species that bear his name (the first was Aphyosemion guineense geryi Lambert, 1958).

Some of his best known descriptions are:

Fonts

  • Jacques Géry: Characoids of the world. TFH Publications, Neptune City, ISBN 0-87666-458-3 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Géry, Jacques
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French ichthyologist and scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris , France
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 2007
Place of death Sarlat , France