René Edmond Malaise (29 September 1892 – 1 July 1978) was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

entomologist,

explorer Exploration refers to the historical practice of discovering remote lands. It is studied by geographers and historians. Two major eras of exploration occurred in human history: one of convergence, and one of divergence. The first, covering most ...

art collector A private collection is a privately owned collection of works (usually artworks) or valuable items. In a museum or art gallery context, the term signifies that a certain work is not owned by that institution, but is on loan from an individual ...

and inventor who is mostly known for his invention of the Malaise trap and his systematic collection of thousands of

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three ...

Early career

As an explorer he took part in an expedition to

Kamchatka The Kamchatka Peninsula (russian: полуостров Камчатка, Poluostrov Kamchatka, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and west ...

between 1920 and 1922 along with Sten Bergman and

Eric Hultén Oskar Eric Gunnar Hultén (18 March 1894 – 1 February 1981) was a Swedish botanist, plant geographer and 20th century explorer of The Arctic. He was born in Halla in Södermanland. He took his licentiate exam 1931 at Stockholm University and ...

. Malaise eventually left the others and arrived in Kamakura, Japan in August 1923, just days before the great earthquake on 31 August 1923 which he witnessed from a short distance before his return to Stockholm. He then traveled back to Kamchatka in 1924 along with his fiancée, the journalist, writer and explorer Ester Blenda Nordström and did not return from the Soviet Union until 1930. On 31 August 1925 Ester Blenda married him on Kamchatka. They would divorce in 1929.

Later life

In 1933 he married Ebba Söderhell, a teacher of biology and religion from Stockholm. Malaise then set out on another expedition of his own to northern

Burma Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...

between 1933 and 1935, with Ebba accompanying him on the trip. It was here, in

Yangon Yangon ( my, ရန်ကုန်; ; ), formerly spelled as Rangoon, is the capital of the Yangon Region and the largest city of Myanmar (also known as Burma). Yangon served as the capital of Myanmar until 2006, when the military government ...

(Rangoon) in 1934, that he had five insect traps of his own construction manufactured, effectively inventing the "Malaise trap". During this trip he collected some 100,000 insects, many of these totally unknown to entomology before Malaise's endeavor. Between 1953 and 1958 he supervised the entomological department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Weevil collected in Burma by Rene Malaise

Weevil collected in Burma by Rene Malaise

His only endeavor into

geology Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other Ea ...

, was his book ''Atlantis, en geologisk verklighet'' ("Atlantis, a geological reality"), in which he claimed that

Alfred Wegener Alfred Lothar Wegener (; ; 1 November 1880 – November 1930) was a German climatologist, geologist, geophysicist, meteorologist, and polar researcher. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and ...

s theory of

plate tectonics Plate tectonics (from the la, label=Late Latin, tectonicus, from the grc, τεκτονικός, lit=pertaining to building) is the generally accepted scientific theory that considers the Earth's lithosphere to comprise a number of large ...

was incorrect, that the migration of species has been helped by a sunken continent of

Atlantis Atlantis ( grc, Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, , island of Atlas) is a fictional island mentioned in an allegory on the hubris of nations in Plato's works '' Timaeus'' and '' Critias'', wherein it represents the antagonist naval power that b ...

, and he defended the "constriction theory" of paleozoologist

Nils Odhner Nils Hjalmar Odhner (6 December 1884 – 12 June 1973) was a Swedish zoologist who studied mollusks, a malacologist. He was professor of invertebrate zoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, and a member of the Royal Swedish ...

. It was widely ridiculed by the scientific community. In his later years he spent most of his time building up a large art collection, including works of Rembrandt.

Sources

There is no written biography on Malaise, but Fredrik Sjöberg's essay ''Flugfällan'' contains several chapters with tidbits from the life of Malaise that he has found in different places.

References

External links

* Vårdal, Hege – Taeger, Andreas
The life of René Malaise: From the wild east to a sunken island.
''Zootaxa'' 2011. {{DEFAULTSORT:Malaise, Rene Swedish entomologists 20th-century Swedish zoologists Swedish art collectors Hymenopterists Swedish explorers Explorers of Asia 20th-century Swedish inventors 1892 births 1978 deaths