Copepod Crustacea (the Kiefer collection)

The renowned collection of copepods of Friedrich Kiefer (1897-1985) is hosted together with his scientific legacy in the SMNK, as he worked here as a volunteer curator from 1934 to 1939.
Friedrich Kiefer was a teacher, but he was also one of the most important copepod researchers of the last century: he published about 250 papers on this group, describing nine subfamilies, 45 genera, seven sub-genera and 292 new species. He revised the system of Cyclopoida and of the Old World Diaptomidae.

Kiefer was particularly interested in the fauna of the underground water system - of the pores in the gravels and sediments of streams, rivers and lakes. He published several books and contributed to manuals, e.g. in the series "Die Binnengewässer”  on the free-living copepods of the zooplankton in the Western Palaearctic waters. For the first time, he made the identification of this group feasible by providing more than 1500 drawings of approx. 130 species of calanoid and cyclopid copepods.

Kiefer has also left an enduring legacy in the field of applied water conservation. In cooperation with the Lake Constance water supply agencies, in 1952 he began to study and estimate the plankton stock in the lake accurately by means of long term surveys. Thus, he was the first to identify the change of the Lake Constance plankton populations caused by the eutrophication of the lake. These results were published in the second edition of his book "Natural History of Lake Constance". The voucher material of this study is still stored at our museum.