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Oleksandr Markevych

Soviet and Ukrainian zoologist

  • 7 min read
  • 6 chapters

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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.

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