Wolfgang Schleidt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wolfgang Schleidt | |
|---|---|
_(cropped).jpg) | |
| Born | December 18, 1927 Vienna, Austria |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Zoololgy |
| Institutions | University of Maryland Duke University |
Wolfgang M. Schleidt (born December 18, 1927, in Vienna) is an Austrian scientist specializing in the areas of bioacoustics, communication and classical ethology.[1] He was assistant to Konrad Lorenz (1950 – 1965), professor of zoology at the University of Maryland (1965–1985) and director at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology, Vienna of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was an early pioneer of bioacoustics and of the quantitative analysis of behavior.[2][3]
Schleidt grew up in Vienna, Austria, and was drafted into the German Army at age seventeen during World War II. In 1944, Schleidt sustained an injury that crippled his left hand and recovered in an army hospital in Memmingen. His crippled hand disqualified him for medical school (his preferred academic institution), so he decided to study biology and anthropology with a special emphasis on sensory and behavioral physiology.[1]
Schleidt sustained Hearing loss during an air raid by the U.S. Air Force that he survived. As a result, he attained increased awareness of the high-pitched vocalizations of mice in the range between 10 and 20 kHz. Schleidt later described the event as a "blessing in disguise", since his hearing for tones at the top of the tone scale were perfectly preserved and his deafness to lower tones meant that high tones came through extremely clear.[1]
At the end of the war, Schleidt began studying zoology and anthropology in Vienna and became one of the first employees at the Biological Station Wilhelminenberg, founded in 1945 by Otto Koenig and Lilli Koenig. His duties included raising a young kestrel, which he had to feed with mice he caught. He could hear the high-pitched squeaks of the mice, which neither Otto Koenig nor Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who was also studying in Vienna at the time, were able to hear. Schleidt therefore decided to construct an apparatus which he could use to convert high-frequency tones into a frequency range that could be heard by a normal human ear.
In order to prove the efficacy of ultrasound, Schleidt started to develop and build his own electronic gadgets, becoming a pioneer of bioacoustics and animal communication. At that time, the technology for electronic sound recording and loudspeakers was limited to a range 100 Hz to 8 kHz. [2][3][4][5][6]
After Konrad Lorenz returned to his family villa in Altenberg in Lower Austria from Soviet captivity in 1948, Schleidt was allowed to move in there and – initially unpaid – to help convert the five-story building into a zoological institute. He was able to continue his studies on the subject of sound perception, also devoting himself determining how mammals that are blind in infancy locate their mother's teets.[7]
In 1949, he created his first functioning device for recording and registering high-frequency mouse sounds from discarded radio parts. Using a whistle, he was also able to test the reaction of his mice to a man-made signal. He succeeded in proving "that ultrasound is the language of mice [...] that the purpose of their squeaks is communication."[8] Until then, the echolocation of bats was already known and that dogs are guided by whistling in the ultrasonic range. However, Schleidt opened the door to a new field of bioacoustics, with his 1948 publication High Frequency Sounds in Mice. The circuit diagrams of his apparatus were also published two years later. For his doctoral thesis, Schleidt used mice to study communication between mothers and newborn mice, which quickly made him an internationally recognized expert in ultrasound communication in rodents.[9] In May 1950, Prechtl and Schleidt described the now well-known, nearly identically search pattern infants of several mammal species make in search of teats by swinging the head back and forth - a behavioral pattern that is almost identical in mice, rats, and humans. [10]
