Zdeněk Bouček

Zdeněk Bouček (8 January 1924 – 17 July 2011) was a Czech entomologist specialising in the Chalcidoidea superfamily of the Hymenoptera.

With Marcus Graham and Richard Askew, Bouček was one of the most important workers studying this large and diverse group in the second half of the Twentieth Century and these three laid the foundations of the modern systematics of the chalcid wasps.

[1][2] In 1969 he was forced to flee Czechoslovakia as a result of the deterioration of the political situation following the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion.

[3] His main subject of taxonomic research was the Chalcidoidea, especially of the families which included those species with larger body sizes Leucospidae, Chalcididae, Pteromalidae, Torymidae and Eulophidae.

[3] Following his retirement in 1989 and the Velvet Revolution Bouček returned to the Czech Republic buying a cottage near his birthplace of Hradec Králové.