In Memoriam: Dr.Roland Grimm (1948–2021)

Abstract

Roland GRimm (Fig. 1) was born on 24 March 1948 in Ell wangen (Jagst), a Swabian town in the eastern part of Baden-Württemberg. Already as a child, he developed a strong interest in insects and started to collect butterflies at the age of 14. He finished high school in Ellwangen in 1968 and then carried out his military service until 1969. Following his interests in natural history, he studied biology at Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen from 1970 on, with a focus on zoology and entomology. He dedicated his diploma thesis to mayflies, therein describing the modified internal reproductive organs of Leptophlebiidae, which possess immotile spermatozoa and a derived sperm pump. He accomplished his doctoral thesis in 1983 at the Zoological Institute of Tübingen University under the supervision of Dr. GeRhaRd mickoleit. In this important contribution to the phylogeny of mayflies, he compared the abdominal musculature across different families of Ephemeroptera. He subsequently contributed to the faunistics of mayflies in Baden-Württemberg throughout the 1980s. He did not continue to work on mayflies after that, but he is still highly regarded among ephemeropterists for his substantial contributions to the field. During his early scientific career, Roland had also become interested in darkling beetles, the group for which he would soon become renowned as an eminent taxonomist, with focus on the Palearctic and Oriental regions. His first contribution on Tenebrionidae, a treatise on the darkling beetles of the Greek island Santorini, was published in 1981 in this very journal (Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde, Serie A). From March 1984 to February 1986, Roland held a position as scientific trainee at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart. During this time, in March 1985, he visited together with WolfGanG SchaWalleR the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, where Zoltán kaSZab, who was the museum’s director and a leading world specialist on Tenebrionidae, taught them the first steps in tenebrionid taxonomy. But Roland’s professional career took a turn towards freshwater biology. From 1986 to 1990 he worked as a freelancer providing ecological assessments, followed in 1990–1991 by a position at the Institute of Hydraulic Engineering in Karlsruhe. From 1991 to 1995 he contri buted OBITUARY