Remembering Franz Huber (November 20, 1925–April 27, 2017), a pioneer of insect neuroethology
enthusiasm for biology had contributed crucially to my later decision to choose biology as my major field of study, turned out to have been a close friend of Franz from his student times at Munich University. Most of the people, academic and non-academic, of the Munich Institute of Zoology with Karl von Frisch as its director were still around, when I took up my studies there in 1959, 11 years after Franz had started. This gives me a particular depth of understanding and amusement when reading all the stories he reports. Later, in 1962, when I arrived in Ted Bullock’s laboratory at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) on the fourth floor of the Zoology building (to stay there for more than a year), Franz had just left a few months earlier after having spent some 11 months as a postdoc there. We shared quite a few dear friends for a lifetime, which we both had first met at UCLA. And we even had our civil marriages at the same place at Ruppertstrasse in Munich, both to a Swabian. Most likely Franz, like me, was asked whether he would like to have the ceremony with or without harmonium, the difference being 5 DM (Deutschmarks). More importantly, we shared our interest in neuroethology and the invertebrates, always advocating the necessity of an organismic and integrative approach. Franz once charmingly promoted our valued experimental animal, the spider Cupiennius salei, to the status of an “honorary insect”. We always had something to laugh about and enjoyed the commonality of our Bavarian roots, which included a specific sense for enjoying life or “pura vida”, as I learned in Costa Rica. At the same time Franz Huber was a dedicated, ambitious and hard-working scientist. He pioneered neuroethology, searching for the neuronal and sensory basis of behavior. Already in his doctoral thesis work (Fig. 1) under the guidance of Werner Jacobs in Munich Franz managed with remarkable success to elicit complex song patterns and various behaviors associated with Clearly, it was a rich life, of which one can say that to be a scientist not only is a profession but also or even more so a way of living. Franz Huber provides abundant proof of that. In his older days as an emeritus professor he wrote his memoires on as many as 467 pages, with scrutiny, charm, lots of anecdotes and photographs, both personal and scientific and many of them of historical value now (Huber 2016). The reader of this book learns about all the stages of Franz Huber’s very active and successful life. It started in Nussdorf, close to Traunstein, a small Bavarian village, then of some 600 inhabitants, and ends in idyllic Starnberg close to Munich (Bavaria). On 11th April 2017 Franz sent me a touching e-mail congratulating me on my forthcoming birthday. Despite some physical fragility a little more than two weeks before he passed away, approaching his 92nd birthday, Franz was still perfectly alert, curious, and open for the many colors and beauty of life and for nature’s depths. His last e-mail to me contained both a poem and a list of intriguing questions concerning the insect brain. When I read through his book “Das war mein Leben” (Huber 2016), I was moved and caught, realizing what I had not thought of for a long time, namely that our paths, though different and mine with some 15 years delay, showed some surprising relatedness. A few of many examples are the following. My biology teacher at high school, whose