A Tribute to Guillermo (Willy) Kuschel (1918–2017)

Abstract

This tribute commemorates the life and work of Guillermo (Willy) Kuschel, who made substantial contributions to the understanding of weevil systematics, evolution and biology. Willy was born in Chile in 1918 and studied philosophy, theology and biology. He became fascinated by weevils early on and completed his Ph.D. degree on South American Erirhinini. Subsequent employment by the University of Chile provided him with many opportunities to further his weevil research and undertake numerous collecting expeditions, including to remote and rugged locations such as the Juan Fernandez Islands and southern Chile. In 1963 he accepted a position at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Zealand, where he became Head of the Systematics Group in the Entomology Division. His emphasis on field work and collections led to the establishment of the New Zealand Arthropod Collection, which he guided through its greatest period of expansion. His retirement in 1983 offered him increased opportunities to pursue his weevil research. In 1988 he presented a new scheme of the higher classification of weevils, which ignited and inspired much subsequent research into weevil systematics. The breadth and quality of his research and his huge collecting efforts have left a legacy that will benefit future entomologists, especially weevil workers, for decades to come. This tribute presents a biography of Willy and accounts of his contributions to, and impact on, the systematics of weevils both regionally and globally. All of his publications and the genera and species named after him are listed in two appendices.

Guillermo (Willy) Kuschel on his 65th birthday, 13 July 1983.

1. Introduction

Guillermo (Willy) Kuschel was one of the outstanding and most influential weevil systematists of the past century. Over the course of his long life he amassed an immense knowledge of weevils, particularly of those of the Southern Hemisphere, which gave him a unique insight into the diversity, morphology and biology of this huge group of phytophagous beetles. While he made numerous contributions to the taxonomy and phylogeny of a variety of weevil groups, his most influential and enduring achievement is the new classification scheme of weevil families and subfamilies that he first proposed in 1988 at the XVIIIth International Congress of Entomology in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The resulting paper [1] is one of the most widely cited works on weevils of the last quarter of a century and has inspired several generations of subsequent workers to test it, refine it and build on it. Willy’s contribution to weevil systematics and entomological science in general is, however, much greater and wider. He was an energetic and thorough field biologist, who organised and participated in expeditions to remote regions and islands throughout the Southern Hemisphere. His collecting and curation efforts, coupled with his distribution of specimens to colleagues around the world, have significantly advanced our understanding of particularly the insect faunas of southern islands and archipelagoes and of specific plant groups, such as conifers and Nothofagus.

Willy’s contributions to weevil systematics were honoured at a symposium entitled Phylogeny and Evolution of Weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea): A Symposium in Honor of Dr. Guillermo “Willy” Kuschel, held in 2016 during the XXVth International Congress of Entomology in Orlando, FL, U.S.A., and at a subsequent International Weevil Meeting that built on the topics and content of the symposium [2]. Due to his age and frail health, Willy was unfortunately unable to attend this symposium and meeting in person, but he sent his thanks and best wishes to the participants. He passed away the following year, shortly after his 99th birthday. As no proceedings of the Orlando weevil symposium and meeting were issued, Willy’s colleagues around the world thought it appropriate to commemorate his manifold contributions to weevil systematics with a special journal issue that brings together a number of papers on weevil taxonomy, systematics, biology and evolution.

An obituary of Willy Kuschel was published last year, including an abbreviated list of his scientific publications [3]. In this tribute we pay greater homage to Willy’s entomological achievements and the impact he has had on weevil systematics throughout the world. This paper features a more detailed biography of Willy, a complete list of his publications (Appendix A) and a list of all the taxa named after him, which stretches far beyond just weevils (Appendix B).

2. A Biography of Willy Kuschel

Guillermo Kuschel Gerdes was born on 13 July 1918 in Frutillar, southern Chile, where his great-grandfather, Heinrich Kuschel (1823–1873), had settled in 1855 after emigrating from Silesia, then Germany [4]. Willy was the sixth of 11 children born to Germán Pedro Kuschel Kruse (8 June 1887 – 5 April 1973) (Figure 1a), as the last child of Germán’s first wife, Clara Augusta Gerdes Heise (9 August 1891 – 1918), who died soon after Willy’s birth. Germán and Clara were married in 1908 in Puerto Varas. On 14 February 1920 Germán married again, Clara Neumann Wittwer (21 November 1891 – 19 May 1974), also in Puerto Varas.

Willy grew up on the family farm in a bilingual family, speaking German and Spanish fluently. He left home at the age of eight to attend boarding school, first in Puerto Varas and later in Santiago. After completing his high-school education, Willy entered a long period of continuous tertiary studies. Two years of studying philosophy at the University of Chile in Santiago followed by four years of theology in Buenos Aires led to his ordainment as a priest in the Society of the Divine Word (Sociedad del Verbo Divino, S.V.D.) in 1943. During this time he also developed his interest in science, in particular biology, and in 1945 he began a teaching degree at the University of Chile, while supporting himself by teaching high-school biology at his own Liceo Alemán. Although his initial research interests lay in botany, he quickly became fascinated by weevils through their associations with plants, and in 1947 he took a position at the University of Chile assisting in the Entomology course, which lead to a full research position three years later. At this time he began a doctorate in Biological Sciences, studying the biology and systematics of water weevils in the genus Lissorhoptrus. His Ph. D. degree, the first awarded by the University of Chile, was conferred in 1953. This research formed the basis of his lifelong promotion of the study of weevils and their host relationships, an area of research that had been neglected by most workers to that point. Willy was promoted to Head of the Entomology Department in 1956 and remained in that position for six years. During his time at the university, he served as president of the Sociedad Chilena de Entomología twice, from 1950 to 1952 and again in 1956, and he also founded the society’s journal, Revista Chilena de Entomología, and edited it for six years.

For almost 20 years, from 1944 until his departure from Chile in 1962, Willy untertook collecting expeditions throught the country, from the extreme north to the southern tip, often visiting remote areas that had previously not or only poorly been explored biologically. Between 1951 and 1955 he spent three periods of two months each on the rugged Juan Fernandez Islands, where his determination and physical endurance resulted in the procurement of an enormous and highly important collection of insects. The lengths he went to to obtain specimens included descending into ravines on Masafuera (Alexander Selkirk Island) to collect chironomid midges [5] and scaling El Yunque, the highest point of Masatierra (Robinson Crusoe Island) and a rugged and barely accessible mountain that had only been climbed on seven occasions previously [6], on the summit of which he collected new species of carabid beetles and tipulid flies. Over 40 research papers based on his material were published in the Revista Chilena de Entomología between 1952 and 1955, and the value of his efforts was recognised by the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarding him the Linnaeus Medal in 1962 (Figure 1b).

Between March 1953 and March 1954 Willy travelled extensively through Europe, visiting insect collections in twelve different countries to inspect type specimens of weevils. This research resulted in numerous synonymies and other nomenclatural clarifications [7], and even today many specimens in European collections bear his determination and lectotype labels that reflect nomenclatural changes still to be published. This Europe trip was highly significant for Willy as it brought him into personal contact with many of the influential entomologists of the time, including Sir G. A. K. Marshall, Eduard Voss, Fritz van Emden and Willi Hennig. Willy spent three weeks in Berlin with Hennig, who lived in West Berlin but worked in East Berlin. Willy feared that the Russian authorities may have considered him a spy, as his passport showed evidence of his recent extensive travels, and so he left his documentation behind when going across the border with Hennig and friends.

In 1958/1959 Willy represented the University of Chile on an expedition to southern Chile, which was arranged by the Royal Society of London and also included three New Zealand scientists, among them the botanist Eric Godley, with whom Willy struck up a long-lasting friendship. In 1961 he was invited by the Royal Society of London to visit New Zealand and Australia. During this period of nine months he attended the 1961 Pacific Science Congress in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he presented papers on insect biogeography of southern South America and on his work on the insect faunas of the islands of the Eastern Pacific. After the conference he travelled to Australia and then worked in New Zealand for three months on the invitation of Eric Godley. During this time he met many people who were to become important associates, including John Townsend and Beverley Holloway.

In 1962 Dr. W. Cottier invited Willy to join the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) in New Zealand. This invitation gave Willy the opportunity to continue the westward research focus that he had already embarked upon, and he accepted. He applied for a year’s unpaid leave from the University of Chile in early November and left for New Zealand the following month. His departure from Chile was necessarily abrupt, precipitated by political and personal differences with the director of the Centro de Investigaciones Zoológicas. Subsequent events in Chile proved the wisdom in his move, and Willy embraced his new life in New Zealand, becoming a New Zealand citizen in 1969 (Figure 1e). However, he never forsook his country of origin. He filled his garden with South American plants, and he was able to return to Chile on several occasions between 1983 and 2003, sometimes with his family. These trips usually combined visits to family with continuing research on the weevils of Chile (Figure 2c).

Willy’s arrival at the D.S.I.R. spawned the establishment, in 1963, of a Systematics Group in the Entomology Division, which was initially located in Nelson. Under Willy’s leadership (Figure 1c), the Systematics Group placed priority on comprehensive collecting in New Zealand (Figure 1d), initially focusing on previously unexplored habitats, such as alpine environments, but ultimately covering most of the country. Over the period 1965 to 1973, major expeditions were mounted (Figure 2a), with most available habitats thoroughly sampled and over 500 litter samples processed annually. Willy personally accompanied many of these collecting expeditions, often in association with Charles Watt, John Dugdale and John Townsend. Willy had an instinctive knack for collecting and an extraordinary ability to predict localities of significant diversity and abundance. These expeditions also resulted in legendary stories, such as his using a scalpel to butcher a sheep on the Chatham Islands. Collecting expeditions were also undertaken to the Galapagos Islands in 1964, Norfolk Island in 1967, Niue in 1975, Fiji in 1977 and New Caledonia in 1978 (Figure 2b).

In 1963 Willy and Beverley were married in a low-key ceremony and spent their honeymoon in Karamea. Shortly afterwards they began their family. Willy was not heavily involved in raising the children, especially during their early years, and Beverley shouldered the bulk of the domestic duties, particularly during Willy’s frequent absences for collecting and research. His children remember him during their early years as being loving and kind, though they often felt they had to compete with insects for his attention. Family holidays were organised with insect collecting in mind, and the house was filled with entomological paraphernalia. As the children grew up, Willy’s relationship with them became stronger, and he was proud of their achievements. Beverley was an excellent systematic entomologist in her own right and strongly influenced Willy’s thoughts and ideas about character systems. Although they did not formally collaborate on any publications, Willy freely acknowledged his debt to her knowledge and insight. His achievements in New Zealand, especially his productivity during his retirement, were made possible through the love, support and patience of his family.

In 1973 the Systematics Group was moved from Nelson to Auckland. The disruption caused by this unpopular decision placed much strain on Willy. However, the event encouraged him to invest substantial time in the curation of the collection of New Zealand weevils. This massive effort of identifying and sorting specimens has resulted in the single-most useful resource currently available for weevils in the country. His comparison of specimens with the Broun types held by the Natural History Museum in London has allowed Broun’s names to be used with a high degree of confidence, despite the lack of recent revisionary work.

Soon after arriving in Auckland, Willy started collecting insects in a small area of native bush close to his home in Lynfield. Before long this turned into a major study of the diversity of Coleoptera in an urban setting. It culminated in the publication of Beetles in a suburban environment: a New Zealand case study [8], usually termed the “Lynfield Catalogue”, in which were provided details of the abundance, provenance and biology of 932 beetle species. On a personal level, the Lynfield Catalogue provided a useful memory aid for Willy. A copy was kept by the dining table and was frequently consulted when he needed to remind himself about names, host plants or abundance of beetles that came up in conversation. In May 1983 he participated in the retrieval of a rare deposit of subfossil beetles from the famous Waitomo Caves (Figure 3a), which included fragments of a large extinct molytine weevil he subsequently described as Tymbopiptus valeas [9].

Willy formally retired from the D.S.I.R. in 1983 but remained a research fellow with the Department (Figure 3b). His contributions to New Zealand entomology were recognised by his election as the inaugural Fellow of the Entomological Society of New Zealand in 1988. The Lynfield project and the extensive collections made by the D.S.I.R. Systematics Group, as well as his work on weevil systematics, were cited as his crowning achievements. Unfortunately, disagreements and personality clashes led to Willy’s disillusionment with the D.S.I.R., with the result that he turned his research focus to the weevils of the Pacific, particularly those of New Caledonia. However, he retained a working relationship with staff at the New Zealand Arthropod Collection and periodically visited the collection until only a few months before his death.

In 1992 Willy had a chance to visit the only continent he had not yet been to: Africa. On his way to visit relatives in Chile he stopped over in South Africa, where he was hosted by Rolf Oberprieler and Schalk Louw. He spent a week with Rolf in Pretoria, looking at various wondrous African weevils in the National Collection of Insects and exploring the surrounding hills, then travelled to Bloemfontein to be impressed by the huge Brachycerus and other terricolous weevils at Schalk’s breeding site and on to the Eastern Cape province (Figure 2d), where he encountered South African rarities such as Somatodes and Hispodes (Figure 2e) and various cycad weevils (Figure 2g) [10]. Back in Pretoria he studied several Cretaceous weevil fossils from Orapa, Botswana, with Rolf.

Willy was not only an entomologist but also an accomplished linguist. He grew up bilingual, speaking German and Spanish at home. During his studies in Chile he learned French and Italian, and classical Greek, Latin and Hebrew as part of his theological training. Only later in life did he add English to his linguistic repertoire, while assisting two English-speaking entomologists with their fieldwork in Chile. Over the period of this expedition, Willy taught himself English with the aid of an issue of Time magazine. He remained a subscriber to this magazine to the end of his life. Willy was passionate about the correct usage of language and terminology and enjoyed lengthy discussions about the origins, meanings and pronunciations of words. The numerous names he gave to new genera and species are not only etymologically correct but also commendably euphonic.

In his later years (Figure 3e), Willy found a lot of enjoyment in his garden (Figure 3c,d) and managed to pack an impressive number of plants into his backyard. These included flora from his native Chile (especially bromeliads), fruit and vegetables as well as several host plants for weevils. His garden provided many fascinating biological observations, including of Nephila golden orb-web spiders blown over from Australia and the first New Zealand record for several species of beetles. He enjoyed spending time in the backyard pool, often late at night, despite being unable to swim.

Willy’s emphasis on collecting, his broad taxon focus and his generosity with the specimens resulting from it have led to his being honoured by one tribe, 28 genera and 212 species from 23 orders named after him (Appendix B). They are also are a testament of the high esteem in which his scientific colleagues have held him throughout his life.

Despite a critical and sometimes adversarial manner, for Willy scientific research was very much about people. Despite his extensive fieldwork, he rarely spoke of it, instead discussing the work and ideas of others. He maintained extensive correspondence with scientists throughout the world. Praise did not come easily to him, but those he critiqued he generally held in high regard. His relationship with Elwood Zimmerman in Australia exemplified this characteristic of Willy’s. Despite many disagreements between these two influential scientists, they kept in close contact and Willy felt Zimmie’s death strongly.

Willy passed away in his sleep on 1 August 2017, three weeks after his 99th birthday. He is survived by his wife, Beverley (Figure 3f), their three children Gerda, Carl and Erika and their four grandchildren Alex, Oliver, Abigail and Elizabeth.

3. Willy Kuschel’s Contributions to, and Impact on, the Systematics of Weevils

Willy Kuschel’s contributions to weevil systematics extended over three quarters of a century, starting in 1943, when he was only 25 years of age, and ending in 2017, when he was 99. Three epochs can be identified in his work, the first of 20 years in Chile, another of two decades in New Zealand until his retirement, in 1983, and then another of almost 35 years in retirement, when he was relieved of administrative burdens and could direct his research interests more freely.

In Chile his work was largely concerned with collecting, taxonomic descriptions and revisions and some faunistics, but as it was published in Spanish and German, it reached mainly a regional audience. Towards the end of his time in Chile, his biogeographical publications, especially those about the eastern Pacific islands, brought him into contact with the broader scientific community and ultimately paved the way for his migration to New Zealand. In New Zealand he placed more emphasis on the exploration and study of island faunas, both of New Zealand and of other southern continents, as well as on a long-term study of the suburban beetle fauna of Lynfield in Auckland, near where he lived. In his retirement he published almost as much as he did during his employment years, and also his most significant works, in particular those on the world fauna of Nemonychidae, the new chrysomelid subfamily Palophaginae, parts of the New Caledonian fauna and, most importantly, those on weevil phylogeny and fossils. He made use of characters that had been largely neglected, even though, like some of his taxonomic changes, he mentioned them almost in passing in a paper apparently about something different. The breadth and depth of his work means that in almost any group of weevils, in any area of the world, there will be some contribution of Willy’s that is relevant, sometimes crucially so.

3.1. South America

Willy published widely on the weevils of South America, particularly on the Chilean fauna (Appendix A), covering numerous groups in larger or smaller detail. Of particular significance is his work on the primitive families Nemonychidae and Belidae [11,12], the Erirhininae [13], Aterpini [14] and Listroderini and the entimine tribes Cylydrorhinini [15], Epistrophini [16] and Premnotrypini [17]. He also made significant contributions to the knowledge of the weevils associated with Araucaria and Nothofagus, partly scattered through his publications but the former associations later summarised more comprehensively [18]. Having also spent a large amount of time on collecting expeditions and departing from Chile rather abruptly in 1962, after 13 years of work at the Instituto de Zoología of the University of Chile, Willy necessarily had to leave quite a number of projects on South American weevils unfinished. Among them was his study of the Erirhininae, which he had expanded from his early work on Lissorhoptrus to all the South American genera, and even though he later translated his key to these genera into English and enlarged it to cover the world genera of the group, it has remained unpublished. One of his particular regrets (and sources of annoyance) also was that work he had commenced on the Cossoninae in South America had to be abandoned when he left Chile, together with the collection. Although he returned to Cossoninae several times (and was working on a paper on them when he died), he never managed to treat the group in the depth that he had planned.

Apart from his taxonomic studies of the weevils of South America and specifically of Chile, Willy’s work in the region had a huge impact though his manifold contributions to the exploration of the entomofauna of especially Chile, both continental and insular. On his numerous expeditions he collected not only weevils but also other beetles, insects and invertebrates and even plants, and he was not content with having collected them but also went to great lengths to make the material available to specialists for study.

Between 1946 and 1949 Willy participated in three expeditions to the extreme north of Chile, the initial one being the first visit of any entomologist to this region, and besides insects he also collected plants for the herbarium of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Chile. From 1946 on he went on several expeditions to the south of Chile, from Biobío to Llanquihue, the first together with his late Chilean friends Luis E. Peña (specialist on Tenebrionidae) and Ramón Gutiérrez (expert on Scarabaeidae) and later ones to Aisén, Magallanes, Tierra del Fuego and Navarino Island. He spent two months collecting on the Juan Fernandez archipelago on three occasions, in February/March 1951, from December 1951 to February 1952 and from December 1954 to February 1955, the last visit together with Prof. Carl Skottsberg. These expeditions yielded large and important collections of insects, which were studied by entomologists around the world and published on in volumes 1–5 of the Revista Chilena de Entomología. Of special interest are the weevils Willy collected on these islands because they are accompanied by important data of their host plants; this collection, presently at Landcare Research, New Zealand, still awaits study.

From September 1958 to March 1959, Willy participated in the expedition to southern Chile organised by the Royal Society of London, which was led by Martin Holdgate (University of Durham, England) and also included the New Zealanders Eric Godley (botanist at D.S.I.R.), George Knox (marine biologist at Canterbury University) and William Watters (geologist with the New Zealand Geological Survey). The expedition explored the region from the Chiloe Archipelago and Wellington Island southwards to Navarino Island in the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn.

In November 1960 Willy spent a month on the isolated volcanic island of San Ambrosio, one of the larger islands of the Desventuradas, studying its topography, naming ravines and plains and preparing a synoptic map as well as describing its vegetation and bird fauna and collecting plants and invertebrates [19]. He sent a sample of the insects to the British Museum of Natural History in London, and from his plant samples Carl Skottsberg described a new genus of Cariophyllaceae and a new species of Eragrostis (Poaceae). Afterwards Willy spent 15 days on the small continental Mocha Island, near the coast of Arauco in the Biobío Region of southern Chile, which is of interest because of the absence of Nothofagus species on it, despite their presence at the same latitude on the nearby continent.

Willy also explored the insect faunas of several other South American countries. He made collections in Argentina in 1943, 1944, 1948, 1956 and 1957, in the Paraná Delta, Uspallata, Mendoza, Buenos Aires and Tucumán. He collected on the altiplano of Bolivia and Peru on three occasions. At the end of 1946 he visited Lima, Junín and Tingo María in Peru, from December 1948 to March 1949 he explored the Yungas on the eastern slopes of the Andean Range and the basins of the rivers Beni and Mamoré, visiting places such as Titicaca, Oruro, Cochabamba and Trinidad in Bolivia and Puno, Marcapata and Cuzco in Peru, and in July 1957 he again visited Lake Titicaca and Rurrenabaque in Bolivia. In 1964, after he had left Chile, he was one of the nearly fifty researchers invited by the California Academy of Sciences, University of California at Berkeley and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum to visit the Galápagos Islands of Ecuador.

3.2. New Zealand

Willy’s arrival in New Zealand heralded a substantial change in focus from his previous work. His appointment as head of the Systematics Group initiated the establishment of the New Zealand Arthropod Collection, which employed his talent and passion for collecting and curation as well as his international connections, charisma, charm and ability to inspire others. It did, however, take time away from research and the preparation of publications. Although Willy began much research on many groups of weevils during his early years in New Zealand, a lot of the work he did was not published in his lifetime, and his archives contain a wealth of research results. He compiled a set of index cards for most if not all New Zealand weevils, and on these he recorded unpublished synonymies and new combinations as well as other observations.

Soon after his arrival, Willy thoroughly revised the weevils of New Zealand’s subantarctic islands. This work culminated in two papers [20,21], which still provide the most detailed study of members for many New Zealand weevil groups. In these papers Willy also started to develop his ideas of weevil classification, in particular recognising the basal position of the Erirhininae. Another hallmark of the subantarctic papers was his restoration of the names of weevils published before, and overlooked by, Thomas Broun’s seminal work on New Zealand beetles, including by Fabricius [22] and Schoenherr [23].

Willy’s side project on the beetle fauna of the parks and reserves around his home in Lynfield again demonstrated his ability to distribute specimens to the right people, who were to provide identifications and descriptions of new species. Some of the beetle species described from the Lynfield material include scydmaenine rove beetles [24], scirtid beetles [25], ptiliid beetles [26] and weevils [8,27]. The Lynfield work also highlighted the diversity of beetles surviving in urban settings and the importance of forest fragments. It was an early and influential work in urban ecology, especially in the New Zealand and invertebrate contexts. Finally, Willy’s attention to the biological information is apparent in the Lynfield Catalogue, with at least a modicum of biological information available for every species included in it. In many cases, these are the only biological data available for these species. Willy’s attempts to understand the plant associations of weevils included detailed records of all plants growing around leaf litter sampling sites, to a level probably unmatched in other collecting regimes.

3.3. New Caledonia

Willy first visited New Caledonia in 1963 with colleagues from the Bishop Museum. His second visit took place from 3 October to 3 November 1978, with John Dugdale, Charles Watt, Ken Fox and Peter Johnson (Figure 2b). This expedition amassed a vast amount of material, which was to form the basis of much future work. After Willy’s retirement, there was a time when his relationship with the D.S.I.R. became strained, and he began working in earnest on the weevil fauna of New Caledonia. Between 1990 and 2017 he published 10 papers on the weevils of New Caledonia, covering the Nemonychidae, Anthribidae, Curculioninae, Entiminae, Aterpini, Gonipterini and Myrtonymini. Three of these papers he contributed to the Zoologia Neocaledonica series, even though it meant quite lengthy delays in publication. Willy’s body of work on the New Caledonian weevils is the most comprehensive coverage of the fauna of this island by a single author since Karl Heller [28].

3.4. Australia

Although Willy was also keenly interested in the Australian weevil fauna as it shares numerous elements with New Zealand and the wider Pacific region, he only got involved in its taxonomic study to a limited extent. This was partly because his focus lay on the New Zealand fauna and partly because in 1972, not too long after he arrived in New Zealand, Elwood Zimmerman (‘Zimmie’) migrated to Australia and embarked on an ambitious study of the fauna of this island continent. Willy had collected some weevils in eastern Australia in 1961 (and also during a later visit, in October 1979), and in the late 1960s he started taxonomic work on the Australian Phrynixini, Cossoninae and Erirhininae. He published his study of the Phrynixini in 1972 [29] but handed over to Zimmie his work and specimens of the Cossoninae and Erirhininae, among which he had identified numerous new genera and species. Zimmie in turn invited Willy to study the Australian Nemonychidae for inclusion in his Australian Weevils monograph series [30]. Willy reciprocated by including Zimmie in his 2000 study of the Platypodinae [31], although Zimmie only agreed to this with hesitation as he felt that he had not contributed much and was not comfortable with phylogenetic analyses such as included in the study. In a number of later studies of weevils of the Pacific region, Willy included relevant Australian taxa, i.e. of Orthorhinini in 2008 [32], Cranopoeini in 2009 [33] and Myrtonymini in 2014 [34], and he also included the Australian genera of Belinae and Nemonychidae in phylogenetic analyses (with Rich Leschen), respectively in 2003 [35] and 2011 [36]. Numerous Australian weevil taxa were thus described by Willy Kuschel.

Willy visited Australia for a last time in December 1999, when he was invited to attend the John Lawrence Celebration Symposium in Canberra. The main drawing card for him was the attendance of Vladimir Zherikhin, of the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow, Russia, of the same symposium and the chance to discuss weevil fossils with him. Zherikhin had published some major papers on weevil fossils, but Willy did not agree with some of the interpretations and conclusions and was keen to debate these with Zherikhin in person. Zherikhin had brought a number of critical fossils with him from Moscow, in particular some Obrieniidae (one genus of which he had named after Willy), and before long an in-depth and lengthy discussion ensued between the two, evidently to mutual benefit as Zherikhin subsequently also excluded the obrieniids from Curculionoidea.

Willy could not meet Zimmie during this visit as the latter did not attend the symposium, but he kept in regular contact with Zimmie by phone. They discussed various weevil issues, mainly their differences of opinion on weevil classification, and struck up a strange but amicable relationship in this way, reminiscent of two old warhorses grazing together on the same paddock in their old days. On Zimmie’s 91st birthday, in 2003, Willy sent him a congratulatory poem that he had composed in Latin. Zimmie treasured this as one of his most valuable birthday presents ever and lamented: “If only I could reply to him in kind!”.

3.5. The World

The uniqueness of Willy Kuschel’s contributions to global weevil systematics was probably his integration of the fauna of the Southern Hemisphere into the mainstream understanding of weevil classification and biology, which had evolved in Europe and North America and was centred on the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere. Other weevil taxonomists had of course studied the southern fauna before him, such as Fiedler, Hustache, Voss and others in South America, Broun in New Zealand, Blackburn and Lea in Australia and Marshall in Africa, but they generally tried to slot the faunas of these continents into the European framework of classification. Willy, in contrast, grew up and studied entomology in the Southern Hemisphere, learning about its weevils and their hostplants in the field and increasingly realising that they did not properly fit into the Lacordairean system. He was among the first to recognise the crucial differences in the male genitalia and accordingly redefined the Erirhininae, he proposed a new concept of Molytinae and he thoroughly revised the world fauna of Nemonychidae, in a number of papers. He studied poorly known southern groups of Curculionidae, such as Aterpini, Cranopoeini, Cylydrorhinini, Ectemnorhinini, Listroderini, Myrtonymini, Orthorhinini, Phrynixini and Premnotrypini. He was also well acquainted with the phylogenetically basal families Nemonychidae, Anthribidae, Belidae and Caridae and their characters, and when the method of cladistic analysis came of age in the 1980s, he had a character set available for all weevils to try it out. The analysis took several iterations, but by the time of the XVIIIth International Congress of Entomology, held in Vancouver in 1988 and for which a special weevil symposium was being organised, he had a revolutionary new classification in hand (Figure 2f). The abstract of his talk was innocuously titled ‘Thoughts on past classifications of the weevils—how a new scheme may be attempted’, but it was much more than an attempt, it was a well thought-through system of families and subfamilies that, published in 1995 [1], has stood the test of time and become synonymous with Willy’s name.

Willy had perhaps the widest grasp of weevil morphology and diversity of any worker of his day. This enabled him to make connections and see patterns with great clarity, and it underpinned the systematic changes he proposed. His profound knowledge of weevil characters and higher taxa also allowed him to assess the weevil fossils that were described from Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. He concluded early (in 1983) that Arnoldi’s Eobelidae were in fact extinct representatives of Nemonychidae [37], and he assessed these and other fossils (including the contentious Obrieniidae) in more detail in a later study of the Nemonychidae, Belidae and Brentidae of New Zealand [38]. He also described a few Cretaceous fossils from Chile, Botswana and Lebanon and reassessed the Baltic amber weevils described by Eduard Voss, which resulted in the recognition of a new subfamily of Brentidae, the Carinae (now the family Caridae) [39].

Willy Kuschel has had an outstanding impact on the development of weevil taxonomy and systematics. The breadth of his knowledge and publications, the challenging insights he developed and the freshness of his views make him one of the key workers in the taxonomic history of the group. Much more than that, he was a unique and powerful character, and anyone who met him will recall intense and lengthy discussions on topics of interest—weevils of course, but also linguistics, terminology and all the things that interested him. His contacts with researchers worldwide, his generosity in sharing his knowledge, his friendship and continued intellectual vitality have left an indelible mark on several generations, and we miss him.