Frisch, Karl von ( 1886 – 1982 ) Austrian zoologist whose studies of animal communication contributed greatly to the founding of ethology as a distinct discipline. In recognition of this he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen ). Born in Vienna, the son of a surgeon, Frisch was a keen amateur naturalist in his youth. In 1905 he enrolled at Vienna University to study medicine but transferred to the Zoological Institute, Munich.
Here he undertook many field trips and worked periodically at the Trieste Marine Research Institute, studying light perception in minnows. He obtained his PhD from Vienna University in 1910 and returned to the Munich Institute to teach and continue research on colour perception in fish. In 1912 he joined the University of Munich as a lecturer. Here he showed that bees could distinguish colour but further studies were curtailed by the outbreak of war. In 1919 , after working in a Vienna hospital during World War I, he returned to Munich as an assistant professor in the Zoological Institute.
Von Frisch discovered how bees returning to the hive from foraging trips can communicate to other members of the hive the direction and distance of a food source by a pattern of movements and tail wagging – the famous ‘dance of the bees’. This formed the basis of his classic work Aus dem Leben der Bienen ( 1927 ; translated as The Dancing Bees, 1955 ). Von Frisch held posts at the universities of Rostock ( 1921 – 23 ) and Breslau ( 1923 – 25 ) before returning to Munich as director of the Zoological Institute.
Apart from four years at Graz University ( 1946 – 50 ), he remained at Munich until his retirement in 1958 . Von Frisch's other works include Bees, Their Vision, Chemical Sense, and Language ( 1950 ), which explains how bees navigate using the sun together with an internal biological clock as compass, and Tanzsprache und Orientienung der Bienen ( 1965 ; translated as The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, 1967 ), which elaborates details of the dance movements and relates how they are inherited rather than learnt.
How to cite this entry: "Frisch, Karl von" Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 7 January 2012
