Haematophagous larvae of a gnathiid isopod were collected from the gills, nares and buccal cavity of a single leopard catshark Poroderma pantherinum (Smith, 1838) at Jeffreys Bay and five puffadder shysharks Haploblepharus edwardsii (Voight, 1832) and one blackspotted electric ray Torpedo fuscomaculata Peters, 1855, at the De Hoop Nature Reserve on the South African south coast. Larvae were kept in fresh seawater until their moult into adult stages. The morphology of the adult males did not conform to that of any known species and they are therefore described as Gnathia pantherina sp. n. The descriptions of the adult male, female and praniza larva are based on light and scanning electron microscopy observations. Characteristic features of this species include the large size of all the final life-cycle stages, the deeply divided mediofrontal process of the male, the morphology of the pylopods and maxillipedes of the female, and the number of teeth on the mandibles (eight) and maxillules (seven) of the praniza larvae.
The paper is focused on the ethnographic and Slavonic works of Karel Vladislav Zap, Czech geographer, historian and topographer (1812-1872), and his wife, Polish noblewoman Honorata of Wiśniowski-Zap (1825—1856). К. V. Zap, who worked as a state officer in Polish Galicia in 1830s and 1840s, used his stay for collecting ethnographic facts, published in 1844 in the trilogy „The Mirror of Life in Eastern Europe“. His work was extremely critical towards the Polish society, especially nobility; in a part of Czech patriotic society it provoked a negative response and it aroused a discussion, from which Zap came out as a moral winner. After his return to his homeland, Zap founded the magazine Poutník (“Pilgrim”), in which he continued, for a short time, to publish popular texts with ethnographic and Slavistic topics. After that, his interests were driven to topography and archaeology. His wife published, besides some translations from Polish, several ethnographic studies from the region of Polish Galicia; most of them were accepted positively, but her last but one study Pictures from the Life of Huculs, in which she tried to compare folk Galician and Czech cultures, provoked a negative response, though the discussion was rather emotional. In the last years of her life, the author was interested especially in the education of girls.