Karl von Frisch

Austrian ethologist

• Born: November 20, 1886; Vienna, Austria
• Died: June 12, 1982; Munich, West Germany (now Germany)

Austrian zoologist and ethologist Karl von Frisch was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his achievements in ethology. He focused in particular on the social life of bees and the sensory capabilities of fish.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Zoology

Early Life

Karl von Frisch was born on November 20, 1886, in Vienna, Austria, to Anton Ritter von Frisch and Marie Exner von Frisch. Frisch’s father was a professor and head of surgery at the Vienna General Polyclinic. When Frisch was young, he collected specimens for a small zoo at his family’s summer home in Brunnwinkl on Lake Wolfgang. Frisch also enjoyed observing animals and recording their behavior.

In 1905, Frisch enrolled as a student of medicine at the University of Vienna. While at Vienna, he enjoyed the physiology lectures given by his uncle Sigmund Exner. Exner encouraged Frisch to study animal physiology, and in 1908, Frisch transferred to the Zoological Institute in Munich, Germany. The most influential of his professors there was Richard von Hertwig, one of the cofounders of experimental zoology.

In 1909, Frisch began studying the evolution of mantis eggs for his thesis. At the same time, he became interested in the formation of pigment in fish. After receiving his PhD in zoology from the University of Vienna in 1910, Frisch returned to the Zoological Institute as a teaching assistant to Hertwig. He then set out to prove that fish were not color blind, as was the prevailing belief at the time.

Frisch’s research culminated in a paper on color adaptation in fish, which led to his appointment in 1912 as privatdocent, or lecturer without stipend, at the University of Munich. That same year, Frisch began experimenting with bees. By using a sugar-water solution and differently colored squares of cardboard, he determined that bees could discern colors. Frisch demonstrated the results of his experiments at the German Zoological Society in 1914.

Frisch’s work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During the war, Frisch volunteered for the Red Cross and at a surgical hospital and nurses’ training school run by his brother Otto. While writing a book on bacteriology for nurses, he met Margarethe Mohr, a nurse and the daughter of a Viennese publisher. They married on July 20, 1917.

Life’s Work

In January 1919, Frisch returned to his job as assistant professor in the Zoological Institute at the University of Munich. In addition to lecturing on comparative physiology, Frisch studied the ability of bees to recognize scents as well as colors. He became convinced that bees possessed an excellent communication network when he observed an entire company of foraging bees swarming around a food dish that had been discovered by only one scout bee. In the spring of 1919, he also noticed that the “round dance” of the bee who had found a dish of sugar-water aroused the other bees, causing them to fly to the dish. Frisch studied this phenomenon for the next three years. During this time, he and his brother Hans found that bees are capable of imparting the exact location of a food source at distances ranging from five to ten kilometers.

Frisch was appointed professor of zoology and director of the Zoological Institute of the University of Rostock, Germany, in 1921. There, he began studying the hearing ability of fish. He proved that fish can hear when he whistled before offering bits of meat to a catfish. The fish persisted in responding to Frisch’s whistles, even when no food was given. In 1923, Frisch was employed by the Zoological Institute at Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), where he discovered that fish became color-blind in semidarkness. In September 1924, he presented a film of his dancing bees to a meeting of the German Society for Natural Science and Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria.

After three terms at Breslau, Frisch was promoted to the position of director of the University of Munich’s Zoological Institute. He continued to study fish and honeybees, and discovered the biological reason that some sugars taste sweet to bees and others do not. While in Munich, Frisch also wrote popular books, such as Aus dem leben der bienen (1927; The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee, 1953).

In 1930, Frisch was granted funding by the Rockefeller Foundation for the building of a zoological research institute to replace the one in Munich. In the autumn of 1932, construction of the institute was completed. The institute included an insectarium, an aquarium, a tropical house, stabling and fenced paddocks, pools with running and stagnant water, and a lecture hall equipped with the latest audiovisual aids. One of the first projects that Frisch undertook in the new facility was a study of the innate warning system of minnows, involving a warning substance that is released when the skin of a minnow is punctured.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and the onset of World War II created problems for Frisch, who had a Jewish grandmother and moreover ignored pressure to align the results of his research with Nazi Party ideology. In 1941, all aid he had received from the government was withdrawn, and he had to rely on assistance from a few influential friends to continue his research; only intervention from these friends prevented Frisch’s forced retirement. However, when an epidemic threatened to decimate the bee population, the government assigned Frisch to investigate the disease and supplied him with everything he required. He employed the principle of odor guidance to increase the honey crop by giving the bees food that smelled of clover.

On July 13, 1944, the work that Frisch had been doing at Munich ended abruptly when a noon bombing raid caused severe damage to the institute. For the remainder of the war, Frisch was forced to continue his research work at Brunnwinkl. He discovered that foraging bees indicate the direction of a food source by emitting a substance from their scent glands while in flight, thereby creating a scent trail. He also found that a tail-wagging dance is used when the food source is more than seventy-five meters from the hive.

In 1946, Frisch accepted the chair of zoology at the University of Graz, Austria. While at Graz, another grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to study the way bees orient themselves through the use of polarized light. Frisch returned to the Zoological Institute in Munich in 1950, as it was equipped with the tools he needed for research. He concentrated all of his research from this time onward on the study of honeybees.

Frisch retired in 1958. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in ethology, or the study of animal behavior, a relatively new science at the time. Frisch died on June 12, 1982, in Munich, West Germany (now Germany).

Impact

Through the course of his career, Frisch dispelled many myths concerning the natural world, such as the belief that bees are color-blind or that fish can neither hear nor smell. His work with the nature of the pigmentation of fish and the chemical senses of insects solved mysteries that had their basis in chemistry. Frisch’s research also helped develop the young fields of ethology and sociobiology. He became particularly known for elucidating the behavior of honeybees, and his extensive study of the dancing behavior of bees yielded much information regarding their complicated communication system. Understanding the behavior of bees has had practical applications for the agriculture industry. In addition to producing honey for human consumption, bees’ crucial role in plant pollination makes them necessary for the successful propagation of a variety of crops.

Bibliography

Burkhardt, Richard W., Jr. Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Chronicles the theories, practices, and subjects that were necessary to create a legitimate science of animal behavior, to which Frisch was a major contributor.

Frisch, Karl von. A Biologist Remembers. Trans. Lisbeth Gombrich. Oxford: Pergamon P, 1967. Print. An autobiographical account of Frisch’s career and the personal and historical factors that left their mark on his life and work. Details the experiments that led to his discoveries.

Nieh, James C. “Stingless-Bee Communication.” American Scientist 87.5 (1999): 428. Print. Describes Frisch’s discovery of stingless-bee dance language.

Seeley, Thomas D. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Print. Discusses the collective decision making of bees.