Zdenek Bouček

Zdenek Bouček (8 January 1924 – 17 July 2011) was a Czech entomologist specialising in the Chalcidoidea superfamily of the Hymenoptera. With Marcus Graham and Richard Askew, Bouček was one of the most important workers studying this large and diverse group in the second half of the Twentieth Century and these three laid the foundations of the modern systematics of the chalcid wasps.

Bouček was born in the Czech town of Hradec Králové on 8 January 1924,[1] then part of Czechoslovakia. He married Tatiana Rydlova in 1949 and they had one daughter, Jitka. His first works as an entomologist were published while he was at the Univerzita Karlova in Prague and he later worked at an agricultural research centre before obtaining his Ph.D. from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, his thesis being a "Revision of Chalcidoidea of Europe".[1][2] In 1969 he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia as a result of the deterioration of the political situation following the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion.[3] He took his family to the United Kingdom where he worked for a short time at the Hope Department at Oxford University before taking up a post at the Commonwealth Institute of Entomology which is located in the Natural History Museum, London where he worked until his retirement in 1989.[3]

His main subject of taxonomic research was the Chalcidoidea, especially of the families which included those species with larger body sizes Leucospidae, Chalcididae, Pteromalidae, Torymidae and Eulophidae.[3] Among his publications was the 800+ page[3] book "Australasian Chalcidoidea" published in 1988. This work was so big that it took one person over two months to compile the taxonomic revisions it contained into the Zoological Record.[2][3] Zdenek published over 150 papers and named over 1100 taxa of Hymenoptera including 47 families and 281 genera.[3] He was installed as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society in 2004 and was awarded the International Society of Hymenopterists Distinguished Research Medal in 2005.[3]

Following his retirement in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution Bouček returned to the Czech Republic buying a cottage in his birthplace of Hradec Králové. He continued to work and publish on Chalcidoidea after retirement. He died on 17 July 2011 following a long illness.[3]