Karl von Frisch

Karl Ritter von Frisch (Note: Ritter is a title, translated approximately as "Knight," not a first or middle name) (November 20, 1886 – June 12, 1982) was an Austrian ethologist and zoologist who received the Nobel Prize in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, for his pioneering work in the field of animal physiology and behavior. His most distinguished discovery was that honeybees communicate by waggle dancing.

Life

Karl von Frisch was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a university professor Anton von Frisch, and Marie Exner. As a child he showed a great interest in animals, which was encouraged by his family. His uncle, Sigmund Exner, a famous physiologist and an authority on insect vision, influenced and helped young Frisch in his early studies of the vision of honeybees.

In 1905, Frisch enrolled as a student of medicine at the University of Vienna, where his uncle taught human physiology. His uncle noticed Frisch’s love for animals, and encouraged Frisch to take some classes on animal physiology. Frisch participated in several research projects on the position of pigments in the compound eyes of certain beetles, butterflies, and crustaceans. It was in 1908 that Frisch decided to drop the medicine and totally dedicate his study to zoology. He transferred to the Zoological Institute at the University of Munich where he studied under Richard von Hertwig. He received his doctorate in zoology in 1910.

In the following years, Frisch stayed at the University of Munich and continued his research on light perception and color recognition in different animal species. He challenged the traditional assumptions of the scientific community about the color vision of fish and invertebrates. This brought him into disagreement with some distinguished names in academia, most notably Karl von Hess, the director of the Munich Eye Clinic.

With the outbreak of the World War I Frisch was called to the service, but was not accepted due to his poor eyesight. He however volunteered at a Red Cross hospital where he established a bacteriologic laboratory, specializing in rapid diagnosis of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. At the hospital he met a nurse, Margarethe Mohr, whom he married in 1917. They had one son and three daughters.

In 1919, Frisch returned to the University of Munich where he became assistant professor. While there he started his work on the behavior of honeybees, noticing for the first time the peculiar “dance” of scout bees. He was so fascinated with the discovery that he decided to dedicate most of his time to study of this strange behavior. It took him 20 years to fully comprehend the complexity of the bees’ dance.

In 1921 Frisch was offered the chair of zoology and directorship of the Zoologic Institute at Rostock University, and in 1923 he accepted a similar position at the University of Breslau. In 1925 he returned to the Zoological Institute at the University of Munich, teaching there until the beginning of World War II. During the war the Institute was completely destroyed and Frisch had to spend several years in Austria and at the University of Graz. When in 1950 the Institute reopened, Frisch returned as its director. He spent this last part of his career in writing, publishing numerous works on color perception and vision in animals. He retired from teaching in 1958.

Frisch received numerous prizes and honors, including the Balzan Foundation Award in 1963 and memberships in the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. In 1973 scientific community awarded him the highest award in science—the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology, together with two other animal behaviorists, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen.

Frisch died on June 12, 1982 in Munich, Germany.

Work

Karl von Frisch dedicated his doctoral thesis to the study of light perception and color changes in minnows. He discovered that minnows had an area on the forehead that is filled with sensory nerve cells, which he called a "third, very primitive eye." He showed that blind minnows could react to light by changing color in the same way as minnows with sight. Frisch’s discovery contradicted the common belief of his time that fish and all invertebrates were color blind, and with this he stirred serious discussion among scientists. The leader of a group that opposed Frisch’s work was Karl von Hess, the director of the Munich Eye Clinic. His opponents objected Frisch’s theoretical orientation, which was rooted in Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and which held that the survival of most of the animal species depended on the development of their senses. He argued that animals adapt their behavior to better suit environmental conditions, a belief that was still debated in the scientific community at the time.

Frisch also studied auditory perception of fish. Again contrary to the established belief of the times that fish could not hear, Frisch argued that they could, and designed a series of experiments to prove his point. He onditioned fish by pairing the sound of a whistle with the delivery of their food. He discovered that fish responded to the sound even when the food was absent. He showed that fish could hear, and later proved that the auditory acuity and sound-distinguishing ability of fish is more developed and superior to that of humans.

Frisch however became famous for his study of honeybees. He first decided to prove that bees could distinguish colors, and started from his assumption of the adaptive function of the behavior. He argued that the bright colors of flowers developed to attract bees for the purpose of pollination. The logical conclusion would be that the bees could perceive those colors. To prove his point Frisch conditioned bees to respond to the blue-colored objects, which contained sweet water. After removing the sweet water, bees would still come to the blue-colored objects, proving that they could distinguish colors.

In 1919 Frisch demonstrated that bees could be trained to distinguish between different tastes and odors. He discovered that their sense of smell is similar to that of humans, but that their sense of taste is not so sophisticated.

Frisch's most distinguished discovery was that of the “wiggle dance” of the scout bee. Through his previous experiments he had noticed that scout bees somehow “communicate” the exact location of food to the other bees. For the purpose of study Frisch constructed a glass honeycomb, so that the bees could be observed from all sides. He noticed that scout bees, after returning from a successful food search, conveyed their finding to the other bees by performing two types of rhythmic movements – circling and wagging. This later became known as the bees’ “waggle dance.”

In 1949, Frisch proved that bees can perceive polarized light, which helps them to navigate through space. They use the sun as their main compass, and in the absence of the sun they memorize patterns of polarization of the sky at different times of the day. They could also memorize the location of certain landmarks in nature.

In his A Biologist Remembers (1967) Frisch wrote about his life’s work:

The layman may wonder why a biologist is content to devote 50 years of his life to the study of bees and minnows without ever branching out into research on, say, elephants, or at any rate the lice of elephants or the fleas of moles. The answer to any such question must be that every single species of the animal kingdom challenges us with all, or nearly all, the mysteries of life.

Legacy

Frisch studied the senses of bees, identified their mechanisms of communication and showed their sensitivity to ultraviolet and polarized light. In the center of his work was the study of the sensory perceptions of the honeybee and the way they communicate among themselves. He was one of the first who translated the meaning of the “waggle dance.” The theory was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Later, however, it was found to be an accurate analysis.

Frisch received, together with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Nobel Prize for his lifework in 1973. It was the first time that scientific community so widely acknowledged the significance of the interactive study of animals and humans.

Publications

• Frisch, Karl von. 1952. Biologie. Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag
• Frisch, Karl von. 1955. Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee. Harcourt, Brace.
• Frisch, Karl von. 1962. Dialects in the language of the bees. W.H. Freeman Co.
• Frisch, Karl von. 1963. Man and the Living World. Harcourt, Brace. ISBN 0151565201
• Frisch, Karl von. 1967. A biologist remembers. Pergamon Press
• Frisch, Karl von. 1974. Animal Architecture. Harcourt, Brace. ISBN 0151072515
• Frisch, Karl von. 1979. Twelve Little Housemates. Elsevier. ISBN 0080219594
• Frisch, Karl von. 1984. Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses and Language. Vintage/Ebury. ISBN 0224022148
• Frisch, Karl von; & Seeley, Thomas D. 1993. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Belknap Press. ISBN 0674190513

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• BookRags.com. Karl Von Frisch. Retrieved on January 15, 2007. <http://www.bookrags.com/Karl_von_Frisch>
• Dewsbury, Donald A. 1989. Studying Animal Behavior: Autobiographies of the Founders. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226144100
• Encyclopedia Britannica. Karl Von Frisch. Retrieved on January 15, 2007. <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9035455/Karl-von-Frisch>
• Holldobler, Bert; & Lindauer, Martin. 1985. Experimental Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: In Memoriam Karl Von Frisch, 1886-1982. Sinauer Associates. ISBN 087893460X
• Warrant, Eric; & Nilsson, Dan-Eric. (Eds.). 2006. Invertebrate Vision. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521830885

External links

• Autobiography – Frisch’s autobiography on Nobelprize website
• Biography – Short biography on NNDB website
• Biography and bibliography –Short biography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• Color vision and the dance of bees – Short explanation of the “dance” of the bees
• Decoding the Language of the Bee – Frisch’s Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1973
• Dancing under a Polarized Sky - Article on dance and communication of honeybees
• The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance – Article in Nature, 435, 205-207.
• Controversy resolved – Article on the scientific proofs that Frisch’s theories were correct

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