René Malaise

René Edmond Malaise (1892-1978) was a Swedish entomologist, explorer and art collector who is mostly known for his invention of the Malaise trap and his systematic collection of thousands of insects.

As an explorer he took part in an expidition to Kamchatka between 1920 and 1922 along with Sten Bergman and Eric Hultén. Malaise left the others and arrived in Kamakura, Japan in august 1923, just days before the great earthquake on August 31 1923 which he witnessed on a short distance before his return to Stockholm. He then traveled back to Kamchatka in 1924 along with his fiancée, the journalist, writer and explorer Ester Blenda Nordström and did not return from the Soviet Union until 1930. On August 31 1925 Ester Blenda married him on Kamchatka. They would divorce in 1929.

In 1933 he married Ebba Söderhell, a teacher of biology and religion from Stockholm. He then set out on another expedition of his own to northern Burma between 1933 and 1935, with Ebba accompanying him on the trip. It was here, in Yangon (Rangoon), 1934 that he had five insect traps of his own construction manufactured, effectively inventing the "Malaise trap". During this trip he collected some 100.000 insects, many of these totally unknown to entomology before Malaise's endavour.

Between 1953 and 1958 he supervised the entomological department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

His only endavour into geology, by publication of his much ridiculed Atlantis, en geologisk verklighet ("Atlantis, a geological reality"), was however not very appreciated. In this book, he defends the "constriction theory" of paleozoologist Nils Odhner and claims that the Alfred Wegeners theory of plate tectonics was incorrect and that the migration of species has been helped by a sunken continent in the Atlantic, i.e. Atlantis.

In his later years he spent most of his time building up a large art collection, including works of Rembrandt.

Sources

There is no written biography on Malaise, but Fredrik Sjöbergs essay named Flugfällan ISBN 91-578-0448-6 (The Fly Trap, only available in Swedish) contains several chapters with tidbits from the life of Malaise that he has found in different places.