Zbigniew Kabata - After The War

After The War

After demobilisation, he was transferred to Great Britain when Italy signed a peace treaty with the Allies and found work as a deck-hand on North Sea trawlers. Kabata became fascinated with marine life and registered for a zoology degree. After graduation, he began work at the Fisheries Laboratory in Aberdeen as a specialist in fish parasitology, while at the same time following postgraduate courses that gained him a Ph.D. (1959) and D.Sc. (1966) from the University of Aberdeen. It was in this time that Kabata developed the notion that separate populations of fish can be identified by study of the prevalence of various parasites and diseases. The identification of populations is an integral part of fisheries science.

In September 1953, Kabata, then still an undergraduate student, married an Irish physician, Mary Ann Montgomery. The couple had a daughter, Marta, in 1954 and a son, Andrzej, in 1956.

During the 1960s, Dr Kabata translated a number of Russian texts on fish biology and parasitology. It was during this time that he began work on his main work, The Parasitic Copepoda of British Fishes, published in 1979 by the Ray Society, ISBN 0-903874-05-9. A seminal work in taxonomy, this book features over 2,000 original hand-drawn illustrations of the complex morphology of copepod parasites.

In 1967, Kabata moved to the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where he became head of the Marine Fisheries Section.