Hans Lissmann FRS (30 April 1909 – 21 April 1995) was a British zoologist of Ukrainian provenance, specialising in animal behaviour. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954, following breakthrough research with his assistant Kenneth E. Machin identifying the electric field generated by the African Knife fish (Gymnarchus), and the uses which the fish makes of it. He was Reader, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, 1966–1977, then Reader Emeritus, and Director, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, 1969–1977. Life Early years Hans Werner Lissmann was born into a wealthy German family in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, which was then part of Russia. As members of the ethnic German minority the family fell under suspicion when war broke out in 1914. Lissmann and his elder brother were sent into "internal exile" in Siberia, separated from their parents, Robert and Ebba Lissmann. At the end of the war they were permitted to return home, but by 1922 the family had relocated to Hamburg in Germany, which is where Lissmann received his school-level education. Hamburg and Cambridge At the end of the 1920s, Lissmann moved on to study Biology at the University of Hamburg. Next he worked under Jakob von Uexküll at the Hamburg Institute for Environmental Research. He received his doctorate in 1932 for work on the Siamese fighting fish. In 1933 he was sent with a travel bursary to the Hungarian Scientific Academy's biological research station at Lake Balaton. While he was there Germany underwent significant régime change. Lissmann rejected a government requirement that he should disseminate Nazi propaganda and instead chose to relocate again. He made his way to India. Here he obtained a stipend from the recently established Academic Assistance Council which enabled him to travel to Great Britain and to obtain, in 1934, a post in the Research Department of the Cambridge University Zoological Institute, headed up by James Gray. The focus of his research during his early Cambridge years was on the interplay between movement sequencing, the sensory organs and the nervous systems of animals. After his emigration, the police authorities in Nazi Germany identified Lissmann as a public enemy. Early in 1940 the Reich Security Main Office included him on the Special "British" list of more than 2,000 individuals who should, as a top priority, be picked out, arrested and detained by a special detachment of SS commandos, following any successful invasion and occupation of