The life, publications and new taxa of Qabir Argaman (Carol Nagy)

Author(s): Kimsey, LS; Brothers, DJ | Abstract: This biography of the Hungarian/Romanian/Israeli hymenopterist Qabir Argaman (= Carol Nagy) provides a list of his publications (except for newspaper articles) and the new taxa and new replacement names he proposed. Dr. Argaman began his career in Hungary, publishing under the name Carol Nagy. He later moved to Romania and finally moved to Israel, where he assumed the name Qabir Argaman. In total, he published 84 articles on the order Hymenoptera and described 348 new taxa (2 families, 11 subfamilies, 58 tribes, 153 genera or subgenera, and 125 species or subspecies) in 15 families, as well as 1 new species of Scarabaeidae (Coleoptera).


The life, publications and new taxa of Qabir Argaman (Carol Nagy) Introduction
The majority of insect taxonomists tend to focus on a single family group for the majority of their careers. However, others have more diverse interests. The taxonomist Qabir Argaman (Fig. 1) worked on a wide diversity of Hymenoptera families during his career between 1965 and 2003, and he did so under different names. Early on he published under the names Carol Nagy or Károly Nagy and later under the name from the University "Al. I. Cuza" in Iaşi, his thesis on the scolioids of Romania being supervised by Mihai Constantineanu. In 1980 Carol Nagy moved from Agigea, Romania to Israel (Menke 1980). According to a note in Sphecos (Menke 1981) he and his family left Romania with only 40 kg of baggage, which consisted mostly of clothes for their baby. He had to leave behind his entomological library and collections in Romania, lived for a time in a camp for immigrants, and started a new life in a new country with all the attendant challenges -learning a new language, trying to find employment (difficult for a wasp taxonomist in such a small country and without his literature resources), and trying to find a permanent home. During this period he briefly changed his surname from Nagy to Grosman, but was required by Israeli immigration regulations to adopt a Hebrew name (Menke 1982). He then became Qabir Argaman ‫ןמגרא(‬ ‫,)ריבכ‬ and from the mid 1980's his papers were all published under this name. In 1981 he began working as an insect taxonomist for the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, Plant Protection Department, in Bet Dagan, working on insects of agricultural importance. However, he also continued his work on a diversity of wasp families, but suffered from shortages of basic supplies such as pins and boxes, an initial lack of a collection and constraints on field work (the threat of terrorism being a concern) (Menke 1987). He worked for the Ministry of Agriculture until his death in October 2003 at the age of 63.
Nagy's research interests changed over the years. Between 1965 and 1968 his studies focused primarily on the Romanian fauna. In 1968 he described a new species of Mutillidae from Sudan (Nagy1968b) and this began the expansion of his research interests into other parts of the world. In the 1970's he began working on the European bethylid and mutillid faunas and small collections of ampulicids from Africa, tiphiids, scolebythids, South American Plumariiidae and Mongolian scoliids. There is a gap in his publications between 1980 and 1986, which is the period when he moved his family to Israel. In the remainder of the 1990's he began new studies of Perilampidae, Sierolomorphidae and Scoliidae and continued his work on the Bethylidae, Sclerogibbidae and Tiphiidae. He produced several papers dealing with the higherlevel classification of various groups, describing many new genera and other higher taxa supposedly based on phylogenetic principles requiring naming of monophyletic groups, but never provided any cladistic or other analyses justifying his decisions. His publications were primarily limited to descriptions of new taxa and faunal lists. He never produced any taxonomic revisions. Subsequent workers have generally rejected his excessively split approach and synonymized most of his names, or else deliberately ignored them (e.g. Osten 2005). His idiosyncratic approach and involvement with such a diversity of groups means that any workers having to deal with his taxa and names should be aware of these complexities to be able to evaluate them properly.
According to an unpublished obituary provided by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, Argaman's personal collection, primarily accumulated once he arrived in Israel, also included some materials dating from his early work in Hungary and Romania. According to Laibale Friedman (in Romano 2012), after Argaman's death the collection was broken up, part being sold privately, and the remainder being donated by his family to the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and transferred to the Tel Aviv University Collection. For unknown reasons, Argaman apparently removed labels from some specimens, including types, leaving them without any labels at all, and making the identification of such type specimens essentially impossible. (When DJB briefly visited him in Tel Aviv in 1985, he gained the impression that Argaman was suspicious of the motives of others and jealously guarded his specimens, not being willing to let them out of his sight; this attitude probably resulted from the personal difficulties he had endured, and may explain the removal of labels.) Repositories of his types, according to his publications and information provided by collection managers, include the following: Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Washington -U. S. National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D. C., USA.
Lists of his theses and publications are given below (compiled from various sources, importantly using information provided by Laibale Friedman which unfortunately had all titles translated into English). A complete tabulation of new taxa described by him is given in Table 1, followed by an Appendix comprising a detailed list of his new taxa and new names, including type locality and repository for each species. If the repository has been confirmed by the date of this publication it is indicated as such.
Others are yet to be confirmed. This is another problem to be resolved; it has not been possible to determine the location of most of the aculeate wasp types described by him. Some, particularly the aculeates, may still be in Romania. Unpublished theses by Carol Nagy (The information on these appears in the list from Friedman; we have not been able to locate them to confirm the details or original titles, however, so several peculiarities are evident.) Nagy CG (1967)

Publications by Carol Nagy/Qabir Argaman
This list includes all publications in books, journals or magazines for which page numbers are available, but it excludes his many (at least 117, from 1967 to 1978) "popular" contributions to newspapers or small local periodicals on a very wide range of subjects (butterflies, snakes, honey bees, birds, scientific expeditions, biological control, ants in forests, scientific methods, oceanology, sea snakes, Antarctic exploration, obituaries, physics of the universe, linguistics, conference reports, turtle conservation, human development, psychoanalysis, archeology, environmental conservation, pogonophorans, black widow spiders, human facial expressions, yogis in ancient India, marine rescues, fossil corals, hare behavior, vitamins, human social behavior, animal suicides, Drosophila cultures, beach events, forest mammals, Oriental archeology, energy sources, noise pollution, ecological non-equilibria, species concepts, concept of life, scientific literature, sea gulls, sand-nesting wasps and bees, general theory of relativity, wildlife conservation, crows, biospeleology and meiobenthal faunas, autobiography, guppies, pollution, medusas, blue-green algae, shipwrecks, lunar orbits, coffee cultivation, scientific ethics, biological systems, animal intelligence, calendars, lagoons, importance of stinging wasps, pheromones, bee pollination ecology, hedgehogs, biology of cancer, dolphins, cybernetics of life, ocean plankton, hypochondria, human genetics, and dogs). The more cultural publications included below were generally authored by "Nagy G Károly", reflected here as "Nagy KG". Where easily available, actual dates of publication are provided, and the sequence attempts to reflect the temporal sequence of publication (primarily based on the sequence in the list mentioned above). Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain copies of all of the entries and have therefore not been able to provide the original titles for those non-English papers we have not seen, but indicate the original language. His papers were in Romanian, German, Hungarian, French, English and Hebrew; English translations of Hungarian and Romanian titles are given in addition to the originals since these are less familiar languages to most, but only English translations of the Hebrew titles are given. Articles we have not been able to locate are indicated by an asterisk (*).
Family Scoliidae  was deliberately not taken into account by Osten (2005) in compiling his checklist of Scoliidae of the world. Elliott (2011) recognized that Osten (2005) implicitly synonymized some Argaman genera by placing their type species in other genera or subgenera, and we have followed this approach, although some of Argaman's type species may have been misidentified since he did not examine their type material.    Argaman, 1994. =Meriina . Synonymy implied by Boni Bartalucci (2004a) in recognizing only two tribes within Meriini. Tribe: Iswarini Argaman, 1994b: 89. Type genus: Iswara Westwood, 1850.