Witt Museum
The Museum Witt (MWM) is a zoological research facility in Munich . Together with the holdings of the Zoological State Collection in Munich, the museum's collection contains around 10 million butterflies and is the world's most extensive collection of “spinner-like” moths .
Museum founder
Museum Witt was founded in 1980 by Thomas Josef Witt (born September 2, 1947 in Bad Reichenhall ; † January 28, 2019 in Munich). Witt studied business administration and came from an entrepreneurial family; he was the grandson of the founder of the Witt Weiden textile mail order company . The museum's holdings have been built up since 1962 through the private collecting activities of the museum's founder. When choosing a name for the museum, a reference to the natural history museums was established. Thomas Witt's two daughters are also members of the Board of Trustees .
In 2000, a contract between Witt and was General of the Zoological State Collection of Munich concluded with the aim to ensure the continued existence of the museum and the collection permanently by a collection composite.
collection
In addition to the premises of the Munich State Zoological Collection, the old building of the Museum Witt on Tengstrasse in Munich- Schwabing is still in use. With the merger, the museum received the status of a department of the State Zoological Collection. The museum brought in 3 to 3.5 million butterflies, the State Zoological Collection 7 million butterflies. The Bavarian State Minister for Science Hans Zehetmair was present as part of the formation of the collection network.
The museum's collection is housed in more than 20,000 insect boxes. It consists of around 50 collections of deceased lepidopterists that have been integrated into one main collection. Plastic boxes, the so-called Proinsecta system, developed and patented by Thomas J. Witt especially for this purpose, are used for storage. In the course of the research activities of visiting researchers, an inventory of around 30,000 microscopic specimens was built up.
The “ neotropical ” moths, ie the population of the South American continent, have been looked after and expanded on a voluntary basis by the Thomas and Brigitte Greifenstein family, Streitdorf near Pfaffenhofen, for over 20 years. The house of the Greifenstein family has meanwhile developed into a meeting place for entomologists interested in neotropics from home and abroad.
Research activities
The museum supports research activities worldwide and promotes the stay of guest researchers, whose permanent staff currently number around 30 internationally active scientists. In addition to the collection of butterflies, the visiting researchers have access to a library with several thousand volumes of specialist books and a collection of around 1,000 specialist journals and over 25,000 offprints that is largely complete from the year of publication. The holdings can be accessed via the Internet, but are only available to visiting researchers for interlibrary loan. A public library loan is expressly excluded.
In addition, Thomas J. Witt organized several 100 expeditions with research teams, some of which consisted of several people, initially to various sub-states of the former Soviet Union as far as the Far East, later to Iran , Afghanistan , northern India , Nepal , Burma , Thailand , Vietnam via Taiwan and almost all of Indo-Australian Islands to New Guinea . Expeditions to North Africa from Morocco to Egypt to the border of Sudan , into the Hoggar massif in the middle of the Sahara to the Arabian Peninsula completed the exploration of the Palearctic fauna area .
Since the beginning of the 1990s, this expedition activity has also been extended to the tropical African continent as far as South Africa and South America . The Africa department of the museum is headed by the Africa researcher Harald Sulak, Weiden and Munich. In connection with his collecting activities, Sulak carried out numerous expeditions across the entire African continent. He used an expedition truck, which has a legendary reputation in research circles.
In cooperation with Günter Müller, Tel Aviv University , the museum is also increasingly involved in international projects to research the malaria mosquito , the spread of which is also a major threat to the European continent due to global warming.
To publish the research results , the specialist journal "Entomofauna" was founded in 1980 together with Maximilian Schwarz, Linz , Consultant for Science of the Upper Austrian Provincial Government , which has since been published regularly with at least 500 pages annually and worldwide with universities and entomological institutes that for their part publish specialist organs, is in the exchange of documents. In 2013, the museum in cooperation with the University of Vilnius , Lithuania, founded the series “Proceedings of the Museum Witt Munich”, in which more extensive research results can be published in book form.
Awards
In 2001, Thomas J. Witt was honored as a donor with the Ritter von Spix Medal of the Munich State Zoological Collection. He was also for his performances on 22 November 2013 by the Dean of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, entitled Dr. rer. nat. hc excellent. On December 6, 2014, he was awarded the Academy Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . On December 18, 2017, he was awarded the title and title of Professor in Entomology by the Rector at the University of Sciences, Techniques and Technologies in Bamako , Mali.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Die Welt: Munich is now also the cosmopolitan city of butterfly research (February 2000)
- ↑ Communication in Onetz from February 18, 2019
- ^ Website of the Museum Witt, see there under collections
- ↑ Awarding of an honorary doctorate to Dipl.Kfm. Thomas Witt. Zoological State Collection Munich, December 2013, accessed on July 8, 2018 .
- ^ Ceremonial annual meeting of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ( Memento from December 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 48 ° 9 '34.7 " N , 11 ° 34' 7.9" E