Max Poll

Max Fernand Leon Poll ( born July 21, 1908 in Ruijsbroek in Brussels, † March 13, 1991 in Brussels) was a Belgian ichthyologist who has studied particularly the African cichlids ( Macropodusinae ).

Max Poll was born the son of a doctor. Through his maternal grandfather, the botanist Isidore Teirlinck, he got a first introduction to the natural sciences. While studying zoology at the Free University of Brussels, which he began in 1926, he turned only to the entomologist and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Malpighian tubules of the beetles ( Coleoptera).

In 1932, at the age of 24 years, began his interest in fish, especially cichlids, and he described the same year, two new species from Lake Kivu. He became a professor at the Free University of Brussels and a curator at the Musée Royal du Congo Belge (now the Musée royal de l' Afrique centrale) in Tervuren.

In 1946 he organized an expedition to the East African Lake Tanganyika, which resulted in 22 new cichlid genera, 98 new cichlid six cichlid subspecies, as well as some gills bag catfish ( Clariidae ) mormyrids ( Mormyridae ) and Slender fish ( Kneriidae ) were rewritten. In 1948 he participated in an oceanographic expedition aboard a Belgian trawler on the African coast of the South Atlantic. He completed a four-volume description of the fish fauna.

From 1958 to 1959 he participated in an expedition to Stanley Pool, in part, examined the cocoons of the lungfish ( Protopterus ), as well as the reproduction of these fish. Other expeditions in the Congo concerned, inter alia, Fish and fishing of tilapia. Total Max Poll described in over 200 publications seven families, 43 genera, 390 species and 25 new subspecies from the Tumbasee, Stanley Pool, Lake Tanganyika, from Katanga, Angola, the Limpopo and the South Atlantic. In addition to the captive by him fish he described numerous it delivered sent new discoveries, including species from the Ivory Coast, Angola, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, South Africa, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Mediterranean. After his retirement, he worked on the four volumes of the check -list of the freshwater fishes of Africa ( CLOFFA ).

Max Poll was a member of the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium and Honorary Member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. Max Poll died on March 13, 1991 in Brussels.

Fish species and genera that have been named in his honor are, among others: Etmopterus pollination, Merluccius polli Pollichthys, Polyipnus polli polli Microsynodontis and Synodontis polli.

Source

• Obituary of the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium: PDF