biology

Roman Wojtusiak

Roman Wojtusiak is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Roman Wojtusiak rather than just read about it. In short: Roman Józef Wojtusiak (28 December 1906–5 December 1987) was a Polish zoologist and professor at the Jagiellonian University who specialized in sensory ecology, animal psychology and behaviour. Along with his students and collaborators he established a laboratory that conducted extensive experimentation on the ability of animals to see colour, sense geomagnetism, and radio waves.

Key takeaways

Roman Wojtusiak belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Roman Wojtusiak to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Roman Wojtusiak from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Roman Józef Wojtusiak (28 December 1906–5 December 1987) was a Polish zoologist and professor at the Jagiellonian University who specialized in sensory ecology, animal psychology and behaviour. Along with his students and collaborators he established a laboratory that conducted extensive experimentation on the ability of animals to see colour, sense geomagnetism, and radio waves. He was also a pioneer of underwater biological studies.

Born to Roman, an official of the Polish Railways, and his wife Karolina, who worked in the armed forces, he studied in his home town of Kraków. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University from 1925 to 1929. He then studied pedagogy and became a high school teacher at the Gymnasium at St Anna in Kraków. In 1930-35 he received a doctorate in zoology on the basis of a dissertation on vision in turtles. In 1939 he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Wrocław and later to the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. His wife Halina Wojtusiakova née Franckiewicz (who was a researcher on plant ecology) wrote to Karl von Frisch and Alfred Kühn to intervene. When Kühn was in Göttingen, Wojtusiak had met a student named Walter Greite who later became an officer in the SS in the Ahnenerbe. Greite helped release Wojtusiak (on 8 September 1940) at the behest of Karl von Frisch. He worked from 1941 to 1952 as curator of the museum at Kraków. After the war he became and adjunct professor and from 1946 a full-time associate professor in the department that was later called the department of zoopsychology and animal ethology. He became a professor of zoology in 1948 and he worked at the Jagiellonian University until his retirement in 1976. Wojtusiak's contributions were very diverse and included studies in oceanography, conservation, ethology and entomology. He devised a diving helmet to help him in studies of underwater organisms under the Gulf of Gdansk. He helped found the Tatra National Park. He supervised numerous students and published books and popular articles in addition to papers in journals. He received numerous awards including the knight of the Order of Polonia Restituta, title of Meritorious Teacher of the Polish People's Republic and Meritorious Maritime Worker, and the Golden Cross of Merit. He was posthumously awarded the Auschwitz Cross. A genus, Romanaria, and a subspecies of moth, Zygaena filipendulae wojtusiaki, were named after him. His son Janusz R. Wojtusiak also became a zoologist.

Publications A selection of publications:

Dabrowska, Barbara; Harmata, Wincenty; Lenkiewicz, Zofia; Schiffer, Zofia; Wojtusiak, Roman J (1981). "Colour perception in cows". Behavioural Processes. 6 (1): 1–10. doi:10.1016/0376-6357(81)90011-5. PMID 24925608. S2CID 37212044. Wojtusiak, Roman J. (1949-02-01). "Polish investigations on homing in birds and their orientation in space". Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. 160 (2): 99–108. doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.1949.tb00519.x. ISSN 0370-0461. Wojtusiak, R J; Z Majlert; H Franckiewicz; W Harmata (1980). "Homing experiments on birds. Part XV. The influence of radio waves on the homingof swallows (Hirundo rustica L.)". Folia Biol (Kraków). 28 (2): 127–144. Wojtusiak, R.J. (1933). "Über den Farbensinn der Schildkröten [The colour sense of turtles]". Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie. 18 (3): 393–436. doi:10.1007/bf00395731. S2CID 39592414.

References

External links Biography (in Polish) Diving helmet designed by Wojtusiak

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Roman Wojtusiak

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Roman Wojtusiak claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Roman Wojtusiak before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Roman Wojtusiak ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Roman Wojtusiak

In research: Roman Wojtusiak appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Roman Wojtusiak in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Roman Wojtusiak is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1906 births, 1987 deaths, 20th-century Polish zoologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Roman Wojtusiak outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Roman Wojtusiak in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Roman Wojtusiak means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Roman Wojtusiak out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Roman Wojtusiak in simple terms?

Why does Roman Wojtusiak matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Roman Wojtusiak?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Roman Wojtusiak.