Otto le Roi (28 November 1878 – 11 October 1916) was a German naturalist of French ancestry. He worked at the Koenig Museum specializing mainly on birds but also took an interest in the

Odonata Odonata is an order of flying insects that includes the dragonflies and damselflies. Members of the group first appeared during the Triassic, though members of their total group, Odonatoptera, first appeared in Late Carboniferous. The two comm ...

, amphibia, and molluscs. He was killed on the

Carpathian Front The Carpathian operation of 1915 was one of the largest military operations on the Eastern Front at 1915 in terms of scale, duration, the number of troops involved in it and the losses of the parties. Background Having repulsed the countero ...

. Le Roi was born in

Zweibrücken Zweibrücken (; french: Deux-Ponts, ; Palatinate German: ''Zweebrigge'', ; literally translated as "Two Bridges") is a town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, on the Schwarzbach river. Name The name ''Zweibrücken'' means 'two bridges'; olde ...

and was of French ancestry with ancestors who had served French kings. After a humanist education at the Apostle Gymnasium in Cologne, he went to the University of Bonn and studied pharmacy. He passed the state examination in 1904 but decided to follow his interest in zoology and received a doctorate in 1906 for studies on

cirripedia A barnacle is a type of arthropod constituting the subclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea, and is hence related to crabs and lobsters. Barnacles are exclusively marine, and tend to live in shallow and tidal waters, typically in erosive ...

. He then joined the newly formed Koenig Museum. He went on several collecting expeditions including in 1907 and 1908 to

Spitzbergen Svalbard ( , ), also known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. North of mainland Europe, it is about midway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range ...

. He assisted Koenig in writing the ''Avifauna Spitzbergensis''. In 1910 and 1912 he visited the Nile valley. In 1915 he joined the 11th Jäger Battalion in Marburg as a volunteer and in 1916 he was killed by artillery shelling while serving on a machine gun platoon on the Carpathian Front . A mollusc ''Limicolaria leroii'' described by C. R. Boettger & Haas, 1913 was named after him but it is now a junior synonym of ''Limicolaria cailliaudi''. A moth ''

Eoophyla leroii ''Eoophyla leroii'' is a moth in the family Crambidae. It was described by Embrik Strand in 1915. It is found in Botswana, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda. The habit ...

'', the neuropteran ''Berotta leroiana'', the stonefly ''Neoperla leroiana'' and the grasshopper ''Aulocaroides leroii'' are named after him.

References

External links

Die Vogelfauna der Rheinprovinz (Part 1, 1906)(Part 2, 1907)

Other works
{{DEFAULTSORT:Le Roi, Otto 1878 births 1916 deaths German ornithologists University of Bonn alumni German military personnel killed in World War I