Introduction

Maurice Dauzet short biography

Maurice Dauzet (Fig. 1) was born on 14 December 1927. After a career as an engineer in the industrial sector, he took early retirement in the 1980s. One of his sons sent him some insects from French Guyana, which greatly interested him. He then set about studying the insects of his region, in particular Hymenoptera and Diptera and, secondarily, Coleoptera, Heteroptera and Homoptera. He lived in Saint-Etienne (Loire) and had joined the Société de Sciences Naturelles Loire Forez and the Société linnéenne de Lyon. Within the former, he took part in the Loire Biodiversity Inventory (Dauzet et al. 2015)

Figure 1.  

Portrait of Maurice Dauzet (photograph supplied by Isabelle Cuzor).

His first hoverfly specimen dates back to 1980 and his collection of hoverflies began in 1986, with captures up to 2017 when he was 89 years old! He collected on all days of the week and retained only what interested him: on 270 of the 599 days on which at least one hoverfly specimen was captured, only one specimen was recorded and, on 28 days, more than ten specimens were retained, up to 21 specimens (Fig. 2). Whenever possible, he tried to secure a pair of each species caught in the same place on a given day, which happened 125 times. He captured nearly all the specimens present in his collection; his friend Christan Bellut gave him 28 specimens, one specimen come from André Ulmer and one from an unidentified person named Jallieu. Dauzet's identifications proved correct in most cases. He worked mainly alone on his collection, gathering the necessary paper reprints by post from the authors. He did not use a computer, but used a card system to keep a record of the specimens he had caught. These cards, now in the Musée des Confluences, Lyon, were used by Dauzet to keep track of all his hoverfly records, whether he kept the specimens or not, using a code system to indicate whether each specimen was retained or not. One or more cards were used per species. For each species, the referenced used for identification are mentioned; these are usually Verrall (1901), Sack (1935), Séguy (1961) and van Veen (2004), supplemented for a few species by Speight and Sarthou (2011) and Speight (2013), for Pipiza and Xanthogramma genera and by Goeldlin de Tiefenau et al. (1990) for Platycheirus. His friends Patrick Subit and Justin Galtier helped him to organise his data and to publish a summary of the distribution data he had gathered in the Loire Department (Dauzet et al. 2015).

Figure 2.  

Number of capture days per number of individuals caught on a single day.

Many of his specimens come from Saint-Pierre-Eynac (Haute-Loire), where his family had a second home. The labels of specimens from this locality bear red triangles on two corners and usually only an abbreviation of the locality name. He had the habit of always writing the code number of the Department of capture on the labels, which made it possible to find the localities without ambiguity.

His specimen preparations were very meticulous and he usually prepared the genitalia of males, even of common and otherwise easy-to-identify species such as Eristalis tenax. This proved very useful for identifying Pipizella and Paragus, where criteria, based on genitalia, are paramount for reliable identification (Goeldlin de Tiefenau 1976, van Steenis and Lucas 2011).

On his retirement into a nursing home, in 2019, Dauzet donated his insect collection and his written insect records on cards to the Musée des Confluences, where they remained to this day. Only the Coleoptera collection remained in his family. He was aware of the research we carried out on his bee collection at the Musée des Confluences (Meunier et al. 2023), even though his health no longer allowed him to take part. He died on 26 December 2021, leaving four children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His scientific documentation was donated to the Société de Sciences Naturelles Loire Forez and his personal entomological archives to the Musée des Confluences (Lyon), along with his entomological collection. His insect collection has become a testimony to the biodiversity of insects in the Loire Department and surrounding area at the beginning of the 21^st century.

General description

Project description

Sampling methods

Geographic coverage

Description: 

Most of Dauzet's specimens come from France (Fig. 3). The only exceptions are one specimen from French Guyana (5.4232°N, 54.0851°E), one from Italy (Susa, 45.1431°N, 7.0611°E) and one from Greece (35.6100°N, 23.5782°E). In France (coordinate range below), most of the records come from the Loire (843 specimens) and Haute-Loire (247 specimens) Departments (Table 1).

Table 1.

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Numbers of hoverfly specimens recorded by Maurice Dauzet per French Department, including both specimens retained in is collection and records written on cards.

French department	Number of records
Allier	2
Ardèche	29
Aveyron	6
Cantal	2
Cher	1
Drôme	60
Gard	6
Guyane	1
Haute-Loire	335
Haute-Savoie	26
Hautes-Alpes	12
Hérault	2
Indre	1
Isère	51
Loire	1118
Nièvre	1
Rhône	21
Savoie	23
Vaucluse	25
[unknown]	1

Figure 3.  

Distribution of hoverfly specimens captured by Maurice Dauzet. One specimen from French Guyana, one from Italy and one from Greece are omitted.

Taxonomic coverage

Traits coverage

Temporal coverage

Notes: 

One additional specimen from 1980 only bears year collection information. Specimens were collected all months of the year, with the highest number of specimens caught from May to July (Fig. 4). Dauzet was most active collecting hoverflies from 2002 to 2014, from the age of 74 to the age of 86 years old (Fig. 5)!

Figure 4.  

Number of hoverfly specimens captured per month by Maurice Dauzet.

Figure 5.  

Numbers of hoverfly specimens captured per year by Maurice Dauzet. One specimen from 1980 is omitted.

Collection data

Usage licence

Data resources

Additional information

Acknowledgements

Author contributions

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