Jacobus van der Vecht
| Jacobus van der Vecht | |
|---|---|
| Born |
5 July 1906 The Hague, Netherlands |
| Died | 15 March 1992 (aged 85) Putten, Netherlands |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Fields | Zoology, Entomology |
| Institutions | Instituut voor Plantenziekten at Buitenzorg (the Institute for Plant Diseases and Pests at Bogor); University of Indonesia; Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; Rijksuniversiteit Leiden |
| Alma mater | Rijksuniversiteit Leiden |
| Author abbrev. (zoology) | Vecht |
Jacobus van der Vecht (5 July 1906 – 15 March 1992), nicknamed Jaap, was a Dutch entomologist who specialised in Hymenoptera, especially those of the East Indies and New Guinea.
Van der Vecht was born in The Hague on 5 July 1906. His father, the Master of the Wine Cellars at the court of the then Queen Dowager of the Netherlands, Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, had an interest in natural history and reared butterflies as a hobby. He enjoyed taking his sons on walks to study nature and this encouraged a passion for biology in Jacobus.
Van der Vecht left school in The Hague and enrolled to study Biology at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. Here he began to study the Aculeate Hymenoptera especially the taxonomy of bees, concentrating on the large mining bee genus Andrena and the wasps in the family Sphecidae. He graduated with a master's degree in 1928.
After graduating Van der Vecht took a position in the Dutch East Indies at the Instituut voor Plantenziekten at Buitenzorg (the Institute for Plant Diseases and Pests at Bogor) in Java. While he was in Bogor he to continued his work on Hymenoptera in his spare time, although he had other competing interests. For example, he lost most of the function of one eye when he was hit by a tennis ball. During this time he published work on the Indo-Australian Hymenopteran fauna including publications on Trigonalyidae, Vespidae, Sphecidae, Apidae, Sapygidae and Pompilidae. At the same time he was undertaking studies on economically important species of animals, mainly pests and their parasites. One important fied of his professional research was the fluctuations in pest populations and this resulted in his thesis on a bug which is a pest of the pepper plant, Dasynus piperis which resulted in him being awarded a PhD from the University of Leiden. Another research project undertaken by him involved the rearing of 40 successive generations of the coconut leafmoth Artona catoxantha so that he could study its population dynamics, habits and the effect of parasites and hyperparasites. The results were to be published in 1941, but the proofs and illustrations were lost during after the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies. However, a copy of the manuscript was found and published in 1950, after new illustrations had been prepared. Yet another research interest was the influence of climate on pests, publishing an important paper in collaboration with F.H. Schmidt on the fluctuation of the east monsoon in Java and Madura. When the war ended he studied the disease of rice, known as mentek in Indonesia, but he failed to establish the cause of the disease.
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