Word: moths
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...Taken out of moth balls...
...mere 1,395. It was stumbling along on a $1,450,000 budget-far below what it needed. The roof of historic old Cutler Hall leaked, and the building had been condemned. Other buildings needed cleaning, painting, and repairing. Patches of bare ground showed through the campus turf like moth holes in a bearskin rug. Not surprisingly, faculty and student morale was in the dumps...
Duane (an amateur entomologist) and Tyler (a spectroscopist) teamed up to test the possibility that female moths send-and the males receive-mating calls in infrared (heat) waves. The researchers first took the temperature of the female night-mating moth with a tiny thermocouple buried in the fur of her thorax. They found that it might be as much as 11° above the temperature of the surroundings. Since all warm objects radiate in the infrared, the conclusion was that a hot-blooded female moth "must literally 'shine' against a background of cool forest objects...
Next step was to study the character of the female's radiation. Tyler knew that many organic chemicals, including some contained in moths, send out characteristic patterns of radiation with peaks on, certain frequencies. So he examined a virgin she-moth with an infrared-recording spectrophotometer. Sure enough. She did not "send" evenly on all wave lengths. Her radiation curve showed a pattern with peaks and valleys. A male equipped to receive infrared might recognize this coded signal as a she-moth's love song...
...finding: "All variations in the length of the hairs appeared to be close to four microns or multiples thereof. It is noteworthy that four microns is one-half the wave length of eight microns, which is well within the emission band of the female." Duane & Tyler suggest: "The male . . . moth has a tuned antenna array which is his receptor for locating the female...