Ladislav Roller - Attila Haris - Ábrahám Levente (szerk.): Sawflies of the Carpathian Basin, History and Current Research - Natura Somogyiensis 11. (Kaposvár, 2008)

Authors

Attila Haris My interest in zoology reaches back to my early childhood. My family had a summer cottage in Fonyód, at Lake Balaton. Our little road ran directly into a big swampy area around an artificial fishing pond. The wetland habitat, just behind our house was my first hunting field. When the regular summer holidays came, we packed everything and moved to Lake Balaton. I am particularly thankful to my mother who took my hand and brought me to the nature and taught me how to recognise the various plants and animals growing and living around us. With my friends, we were busy to collect all type of animals that we could found there: frogs, lizards and even snakes that we kept in bottles for a day or two feeding and watching them. My particular interest to the entomology started at my age of 10 when I set up my first insect collection at the afternoon club of my elementary school. I took regular collecting trips around my native village, Kaposmérő. This general interest in entomology lasted till my second or third year in the grammar school. In that time, I collected everything but mainly moths, butterflies and beetles. My closer relationship with sawflies started when Dr. János Szabolcs (lecturer of Keszthely University) accepted me to be his student. The title of my master thesis was the "Biology of wheat sawflies and their control". Later this topic became my Ph. D. thesis that I defended in 2000. Meantime, I participated in the research program of the Danube-Ipoly National Park where I investigated the Aculeata fauna (wild bees, chrysidid, pompilid and sphecoid wasps) of Szentendre Island, the Naszály Hill, the Western Börzsöny Mountains, the Ipoly flood plain and the Gödöllő Hills either. I am very thankful to Mr. Zsolt Józan for teaching me and checking my early identifications in bees and wasps. During my university graduation, I slowly extended my competitiveness from the wheat sawflies to the total Symphyta fauna of Hungary. This time, I spent my summer practice at the Natural History Department of the Somogy County Museum under the supervision of Levente Ábrahám. It was a really great chance for me to practice the identification of sawflies by using the microscope of the natural history department. As a refund, I donated my sawflies to the museum and slowly started to copy the most relevant papers and identification keys on sawflies as much as I could financially afford. Sometimes, I even visited the Budapest Museum and loaned some identified sawflies for comparison. As a result of my limited possibilities my early papers were full of old and outdated names, but anyhow, it started. Professor Gyula Sáringer offered me a Ph.D. grant therefore my first study trips were partly sponsored. So, I had chance to visit the collections of the natural history museums of London, Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Eberswalde and München. I slowly extended my knowledge to the whole Palaearctic and Oriental Tenthredinidae fauna and even a little bit to the Nearctic sawflies as well. In 2000, I published my study on the Oriental sawflies of the Natural History Museum, London. In 2003, I studied and identified the Nematinae collection of the Stockholm Natural History Museum, in 2004, the Oriental sawflies of the Madrid Museum, and in 2005, I worked for the Amsterdam Museum