Wacław Wojciechowski - 70th birthday

Abstract

Wacław Bronisław WOJCIECHOWSKI was born in Potok-Stany in the former district of Lublin on 20th January 1945. Between 1958 and 1962 he attended the Secondary Comprehensive School in Zaklików. On graduating from the Technical School of Analytics in Lublin in 1965, he started to study at the Faculty of Biology and Earth Sciences, Maria Skłodowska-Curie University, Lublin, in 1966. From the beginning he was associated with the Department of Systematic Zoology (later the Department of Zoology). He graduated in 1972 and a year later moved from Lublin to Silesia, where he became a university teacher at the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, Silesian University, on 1st July 1973. At that time he became interested in aphids, focusing on their taxonomic diversity (MSc Thesis) and phylogenetic relations. His studies of the course of aphid evolution were based on the morphological analysis of the structure of the male reproductive system and the digestive system (a series of papers in which he was a co-author – see the List of Publications 3-7), and the results contributed to his PhD thesis entitled “The processes of oligomerisation in the structure of the male reproductive system in lachnids (Homoptera, Lachnidae)”. It was defended at the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection, Silesian University, Katowice, in 1976. The dissertation was supervised by Professor Sędzimir Maciej KLIMASZEWSKI, who was Head of the Department of Systematic Zoology at that time. In his thesis the author showed that in the Lachnidae family there are no accessory glands in the male reproductive system and drew the conclusion that the Lachnidae could not have been the original group for other aphids because such structures are present in all the other families. He also pointed out that the number of testicular follicles was subject to oligomerisation in the course of evolution: it is the highest in the oldest genera and decreases in younger groups.