Janusz Wojtusiak

Janusz Wojtusiak (February 21, 1942 – May 2, 2012) was a Polish entomologist and son of the well-known Polish biologist, Roman Wojtusiak, Professor at the Jagiellonian University.

He began his biological studies at the Jagiellonian University in 1959. After graduating in 1964, he was employed as an Assistant in the Department of Systematic Zoology and Zoogeography under the leaderships of Professor Stanisław Smreczyński. Throughout the 1960s and in the early 1970s he was particularly involved in the activities of the Polish Mountaineering Association.

He presented his Ph.D. thesis in 1971. It concerned the morphology of the Adelidae family. Soon after gaining the title of doctor habilitatus at the beginning of the 1980s, he was appointed Head of the Zoological Museum of the Jagiellonian University. Immediately afterwards, he was offered a contract to teach at a university in Nigeria. Between 1982 and 1986, Janusz taught zoology and entomology at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka.

One of the scientific result of his stay in Nigeria was the description of a new morphological organ in the ants of the genus Oecophylla, pretarsal pads, which allow these insects to push large prey on smooth and almost vertical surfaces.

After returning from Nigeria, he continued his research in the field of entomology. In 1991, he published a textbook on the ethology of insects, which is the only such comprehensive treatment of this topic in the Polish language to date.

In 1994, he received a professorial nomination from the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Wałęsa.

From the mid-1990s, Wojtusiak concentrated on the mountainous areas of South America, participating in or organising more than ten scientific expeditions into the Andes, which resulted in more than 100 scientific publications and descriptions of more than 400 new species of butterflies and moths, principally belonging to the Tortricidae family, in co-authorship with Professor Józef Razowski.