Frank H. Hennemann


I was born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein in 1978 and grew up in the beautiful Vorderpfalz along the “Deutsche Werinstraße”, Germany’s biggest and mkost famous wine region. I became interested in nature bur „creepy-crawlies“ in particular in my early childhood already. It was my cousin who introduced me to phasmids and from whom I received my first live phasmids (Extatosoma tiaratum and Haplopus micropterus) in 1989. These awakened a grwoing interest in these fascinating insects and soon I made contact with other breeders in my region at a meeting held in the Pfalzmuseum für Naturkunde in Bad Dürkheim. The result was a growing number of species, cages and terrariums which finally occupied a complete room in my mothers house. In addition to phasmids I have also reared beetles (Coleoptera), various Orthopthera (grasshoppers & katydids), praying mantids (Mantodea) and cockroaches (Blattodea) during the mid 1990’s. However, I restricted to phasmids in the late 1990’s and have since frequently kept more than 30 different species in my laboratory.
Due to my father used to work and live in Singapore for several years, I was given the opportunity to explore Southeast Asia and undertook several travels together with my father in the early 1990’s. My increasing fascination in insects has made these travels with my father become more and more what one would call “expeditions” which had the main aim to find phasmids. These travels throughout Southeast Asia furthermore have resulted in a great passion for the tropics themselves. Rather early I began to preserve dead phasmids from my cultures in order to build up a reference collection of dried Phasmatodea and it was mainly the distinction of species which has awakened my interest in the taxonomy and systematics of these insects. In addition to building up a hughe collection of preserved Phasmatodea, which contains several thousands of dried and pinned specimens, I have in my early years also collected other insect-orders. The close friendship to Oskar resulted in a common passion for Phasmatodea, numerous collecting-trips to the tropics and a fantastic collaboration in all of our projects and studies. In 2000 we realized our idea of having a website and brought “Phasmatodea – the world of stick and leaf-insects” online.   .

I am a member of the "Orthopterist’s Society", „Münchner Entomologischen Gesellschaft, MEG“and since 2003 I am a collaborator of the „Section Rhynchota“ of the State Entomological Collections (ZSMC) in Munich. I furthermore act as a referee for several renowned journals checking and commenting on submitted manuscripts prior to their publication, and as a phasmid-specialists I am also involved in several official international research-projects.

Starting with a study in biology (Master) I switched over to a become a secondary-school teacher for biology and politics and currently finish my study at the Technical University, Kaiserslautern. Next to my general passion for biology, which in particular concerns to entomology, evolution, biodiversity, taxonomy, phylogenetics and biogeography, I am interested in archeology, politics, motor-engineering, photography, graphics and video-processing.