Page 39 - VHSA - Onderstepoort 100 Years - Part 3

I.G. (Ivan) Horak, who had previous-
ly been employed in the Section of
Helminthology at the Institute from 1961
to 1966 but had been working in the
pharmaceutical industry since then, left
the industry and became a member of
staff of the Department of Parasitology of
the Faculty under R.K. Reinecke in 1974.
Most of Horak’s earlier research had been
devoted to internal parasites, a field in
which he continued to do research, but he
soon became involved in research on the
ectoparasites of domestic and wild animals
in South Africa. This involvement yielded a
long series of papers, covering the parasites
of mammals as small as mice and as large
as giraffes, as well as those of birds and
reptiles in every province of South Africa
and also in Namibia. He left the Faculty for
Rhodes University in 1982 where he spent 5
years at the Tick Research Unit, but rejoined
the Faculty in 1987. With the exception
of the 5 years that he was at Rhodes Uni-
versity, during which time he worked in the
southern National Parks of South Africa
and on surrounding commercial farms,
Horak had ongoing research projects on
the parasites of wildlife and free-living ticks
on the vegetation in the Kruger National
Park from 1978 until 2002. Between 1988
and 1998 he and his co-workers dragged
flannel strips over the vegetation of two Landscape Zones in the Park for a total distance of 5 km each month, and from 1999 until 2002 for a distance of 21 km, in order to collect free-living ticks.
ONDERSTEPOORT 100
They found that the drought of 1992 resulted in the virtual complete disappearance of the brown ear tick, R. appendiculatus from the vegetation of one of the Landscape Zones in which it had previously been abundant. Furthermore, the exceptionally warm winters of the late 1990s resulted in the blue tick, B. decolo- ratus, completing an additional life cycle annually. In later years his interest changed to determining the geographic distribution of ticks in various regions and shifts that may have occurred in their distributions since earlier surveys had been done. In this way he and his postgraduate students determined the geographic distributions of ticks in Maputo Province of Mozambique and in the eastern regions of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, and tackled the regions north of Bloemfontein in Free State Province. After his retirement in 1996 he remained at the Faculty.
Like Mönnig and Theiler before him he was equally comfortable in the disciplines of Entomology and Helminthology, as attested to by his many publications in which he included both the external and internal parasites of a particular host species. He is probably the most prolific author of all the Onderstepoort parasitologists, with more than 250 research articles to his credit.
With B. Fivaz and T.N. Petney he co-edited a book on the medi-
cal and veterinary aspects of tick vector biology, and with 129 J.B. Walker and J.E. Keirans he co-authored the book on
the brown ticks of the world. He has also acted as super-
visor or co-supervisor to more than 20 postgraduate students in parasitology, and Reinecke, Nevill, Bezuidenhout, Boomker, Sutherland, Louw and N.R. (Nigel) Bryson, who at various times were or are staff members of the Institute or Faculty, all enjoyed his supervision in this respect.
J.D. (Dürr) Bezuidenhout qualified as a veterinarian in 1966 and thereafter became a state veterinarian in Namibia. While there he collected ticks towards a survey on the ticks of Namibia. Gertrud Theiler, Heloise Heyne, Jane Walker and Ivan Horak and several non-Onderste- poort persons have all been involved in this project, which will hopefully come to fruition in a book on the ticks of Namibia. Bezuidenhout joined the Section of Entomology at the Institute in 1974.
“Horak had ongoing research projects on the parasites of wildlife and free-living ticks on the vegetation in the Kruger National Park from 1978 until 2002.”
Dragging to collect ticks for ecological studies in the Kruger National Park
Parasitology
1908-2008
Years