Hans Lissmann overcame extraordinary difficulties to become one of the pioneers of experiments on animal locomotion and the discoverer of the electric sense of fishes. The Russian Empire He was born on 30 April 1909 at Nikolayev, a Black Sea port near Odessa. Most of what we know of his early life comes from two typewritten memoirs, written in 1944 when he was interned. He was the younger of the two sons of German parents, Robert Lissmann, an exporter of grain, and his wife Ebba. A photograph taken in 1913 or 1914 shows a prosperous family formally posed with the boys dressed immaculately and impractically, entirely in white. Until Hans was five the family lived in Nikolayev and in Novorossiysk, another port on the northern shore of the Black Sea. He spoke Russian with his parents and French with his grandparents. Then, after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the family was sent to Kargala, a village near Orenburg on the edge of the Urals, 1100 miles north-east of Nikolayev. There they were interned as aliens among a population of Tartars, Bashkirs and Kirghis. Hans learned some Tartar, and was also taught German. Drawings that he made there show a village of log buildings inhabited by men in turbans, and a rider on a Bactrian camel. Their mother taught the boys arithmetic and languages, and arranged for them to be introduced to biology by an interned zoologist and a botanist who took them into the surrounding countryside on summer afternoons. She supported the family by teaching in the village school when her husband was arrested and taken away for several months. The Russian Revolution came, and Kargala was captured and recaptured several times by the Reds and Whites.
First report of Saduria (Mesidotea) entomon (Linnaeus, 1758) (Isopoda: Chaetiliidae) in the Black Sea
