Wolfgang Schleidt

Schleidt grew up in Vienna, Austria, and at age 17 was drafted into the German Army. In 1944, Schleidt sustained an injury that crippled his left hand, and recovered in an army hospital in Memmingen. He also survived an air raid by the US Air Force. His crippled hand disqualified him for medical school (his preferred academic institution), and he decided to study biology and anthropology, with special emphasis on sensory and behavioral physiology.[1]

Hearing loss, which had resulted from the air raid, increased his awareness of the vocalizations of mice in the range between 10 and 20 kHz. At that time, the technology for electronic sound recording and loudspeakers was limited to a range 100 Hz to 8 kHz. In order to prove the use of ultrasound, Schleidt started to develop and build his own electronic gadgets and thus became a pioneer of bioacoustics and animal communication.[2][3][4][5][6]

Konrad Lorenz became Schleidt's most influential teacher, and when he became the director of his own research facility of Max-Planck Gesellschaft in Buldern (Westphalia, Germany), he asked him to become his first assistant. Schleidt served as the supervisor of construction for the newly founded Max-Planck-Institut for Behavioral Physiology in Bavaria and he suggested the name "Seewiesen" for this location. Schleidt along with his wife Margret, daughter Christiane, and a flock of 400 wild geese became Seewiesen's first residents. During his tenure at Seewiesen, he started his critical review of the basic concepts of ethology, the study of animal behavior.[5][7][8]

After serving one year as a visiting research professor at Duke University (1964–65) with Peter H. Klopfer and Donald K. Adams,[9] Schleidt became a professor of zoology at the University of Maryland (1965–85) and leader of the ethology group at the department of zoology, where he continued his research in quantitative ethology and animal communication.[6][9][10][11][12] Schleidt became a director at the Institute for Comparative Behavior Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1985. He retired in 1992, but continued teaching at the University of Vienna until 2003, and is to this day working and publishing.[13][14][15][16]