Word: oscillographs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Warning Wiggles. Working with infinite care, Roeder and Treat took a live moth, attached delicate wires to the nerves leading out of one of its ears, and connected the little insect to an amplifier and an oscillograph. Then they turned on an electronic generator that gave out brief bursts of ultrasonic sound-a reasonable imitation of a prowling bat. Even where the man-made beeps were too weak to be detected by man-made microphones, the moth's ear responded with electrical signals. When the imitation bat sounded louder, as if it were closing in, the moth...
...moth's sonar-detecting apparatus in the laboratory, Roeder and Treat tried it out in the field against real bats. They set up their apparatus on a Massachusetts hillside, and at nightfall their wired moth began to detect the ultrasonic cries of bats. From the traces on their oscillograph, the biologists could tell whether an invisible bat was approaching or flying away. Later, when Roeder and Treat turned on a powerful floodlight, they could watch the bats diving on their prey and hear, through the captive moth's ear, the bats' searching sonar beeps and their final...