Gustav Kramer

Gustav Kramer ( born March 11, 1910 in Mannheim, † 19 April 1959 Castrovillari, Italy ) was a German zoologist and ornithologist. He discovered the end of the 1940s that birds can use the sun as a compass.

Gustav Kramer received his doctorate in Berlin in 1933 by a study on African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) and worked in Heidelberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research under Ludolf von Krehl on the metabolism alternately warm animals. After that he worked as a research assistant at the German - Italian Institute of Marine Biology in Rovinj, and finally - to 1941 - in Naples lizards, especially on the Adriatic wall lizard. Comparative morphometric and experimental genetically - he examined especially the differences between mainland and island races since therefrom conclusions could be drawn on the speciation.

Since 1948, Gustav Kramer headed a department of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology in Wilhelmshaven. There he developed a work program to address the question of how birds are able to orient themselves over long distances. He constructed an apparatus by means of which his test animals an incorrect position of the sun could be tricked and pointed so after that the preferential flight direction of the sun's position is dependent on the sky. Since such a capability the possession of an internal clock presupposes that can measure the time of day, Kramer sought cooperation with, among others, Jürgen Aschoff.

In fact, Kramer was along with Aschoff assigned to the newly created Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology on April 1, 1958. In the vicinity of Tübingen should arise for him a new building. Meanwhile, excavation work had already begun, as Gustav Kramer crashed on April 19, 1959 while trying to take young rock pigeons from their nests in the mountains of Calabria from and died instantly His two sons hid his body under mortal danger from the high-running mountain river Raganello.

In an obituary Konrad Lorenz wrote in the Journal of Ornithology, " his authorized worldwide fame as the initiator of experimental analytical research orientation " should not be forgotten, " won what a highly important results Gustav Kramer on entirely different areas " have. For this purpose, count the discovery of the " Ferntastsinnes " the clawed frog in his doctoral thesis and his expertise in the field of allometry of birds.

Publications (selection)

• Studies on the senses and how the orientation behavior of Xenopus laevis Daud. Zool. Cent, Vol 52, pp. 629-676, Jena: Fischer 1933; zugl. Berlin, Phil Diss
• Experiments on bird orientation. Ibis 94: 265-285 (1952)