# Oleksandr Markevych

Oleksandr Prokopovych Markevych (Ukrainian: Олександр Прокопович Маркевич; 19 March 1905, Ploske – 23 April 1999, Kyiv) was a Soviet and Ukrainian zoologist, and a prolific helminthologist and copepodologist. He was professor and an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

## Biography

Markevych was born 19 March 1905 in the village of Ploske, Kiev Governorate. His father Prokop Markevych served as a parish clerk in a rural church. His mother Maria Bordashevska came from a family of the impoverished nobility. During his studies at the Pedagogical Technical School (1921–1925) in Bila Tserkva, he was engaged in research on ichthyology. He continued his studies at Kyiv University, where he worked in the laboratory of Ivan Schmalhausen and simultaneously at the biological station of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, situated on the Dnieper River.
His keen interest in fish parasites led him to work at the Ichthyological Institute of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Leningrad (now the Research Institute of the Lake and River Fish Industry), where he completed his post-graduate studies under the guidance of professor Valentin Dogiel. In the 1930s a team of scientists at the Laboratory of Fish Diseases, headed by Dogiel, laid the foundations of Soviet ichthyoparasitology. At this laboratory the young Markevych began to study the then little known and very complicated group Copepoda parasitica, with extraordinary diligence and perseverance. He studied the fauna of this group living in lakes Ladoga and Onega, in the Caspian and Azov seas and in a number of smaller water bodies.
In 1935 he returned to Kyiv, where at first he headed the Invertebrate Morphology Department of the Zoological Institute, in the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, then in 1937 became head of the newly established Parasitological Department of that Institute.

## Scientific career and publications

Markevych was one of the first Soviet parasitologists to begin a systematic study of fishpond culture. He was the first to publish that the dangerous fish parasite Chilodonella cyprini reproduces massively in the winter and not in the summer, as supposed earlier. His key papers described the new species of parasitic copepods:
* Ergasilus briani Markevych, 1932
* Paraergasilus rylovi Markevych, 1937
* Ergasilus auritus Markevych, 1940
* Ergasilus anchoratus Markevych, 1946
After returning to Kyiv in 1935 Markevych continued his ichthyoparasitological investigations. In 1951 he published an extensive monograph on the parasite fauna of freshwater fishes of the Ukrainian SSR. This monograph received a strong response in the USSR and abroad. In 1963 it was published in English under the title "Parasitic Fauna of Freshwater Fish of the Ukrainian SSR". He continued to be actively interested in the research of Copepoda parasitica, and his latest monograph on the parasitic Copepoda of fish in the USSR was published for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Science Foundation (USA) by the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (1976).
Proceeding from a series of solid scientific works on fish parasites (ichtyoparasitology) he formulated some theoretical fundamentals after complex studies on parasites of aquatic animals (hydroparasitology). As part of a scientific program, he identified studies needed on the ecology and development of the parasites of aquatic animals, studies on their influence on their host and vice versa, and studies on their dependence on abiotic and biotic factors.
The theory of parasitocenosis, formulated by E. N. Pavlovsky, found a follower in A. P. Markevych. Attracted by Pavlovsky's concept of parasitocenosis, Markevych analyzed new facts obtained by parasitologists and microbiologists since Pavlovsky's publications, wrote several papers on this issue, and defined the task of parasitocenology as the "elucidation of objective patterns of life of parasitosymbiocenoses as well as biocenotic groupings of free-living parasite stages, in order to elaborate methods for directing the formation processes of parasitic communities".
Markevych created a school of parasitologists in Ukraine and sparked the interest of a number of zoologists and botanists in the research of Carpathian fauna and flora. For several years he was Vice-president and later President of the Biological Sciences Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He also made outstanding contributions to the research of parasite fauna of fish in Egypt, where he worked as expert and professor at Cairo University (periodically 1964 to 1967).

## International activities and honors

* In 1958 member of the delegation of the USSR to the Fifteenth International zoological congress in London (Great Britain).
* In 1959 visited Bulgaria, lecturing on practical questions of the phylogeny of invertebrate animals in the University of Sofia.
* In 1964-1965 professor of the Zoology Department of the Faculty of Science at Cairo University.
* In 1966-1967 expert on questions of parasitology in the National Scientific Center of the Arabic Republic of Egypt (ARE).
* In 1967 appointed an honoured member of the Polish Society of Parasitologists.
* In 1969 selected member of Academy of Zoology of India.
* In 1969 appointed member of the International Commission of Protozoology.
* In 1970 he led a delegation of Soviet scientists to the Second International Congress of Parasitologists in Washington (USA).
* Editorial board member of the journals Angewandte Parasitologie (East Germany (GDR)) and Folia parasitologica (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic).