Wolfgang Schleidt

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Wolfgang Schleidt (2015)

Wolfgang M. Schleidt (born December 18, 1927 in Vienna ) is an Austrian researcher in the field of classical ethology . He was director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative Behavioral Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is considered one of the founders of bioacoustics .

life and work

Wolfgang Schleidt grew up in Vienna and, barely 17 years old, was drafted into the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944 . During an air raid in April 1945, an explosion in the immediate vicinity caused a sound trauma that permanently damaged his hearing. “The luck in misfortune: The feeling for tones at the top end of the tone scale was retained, and the deafness in the area below made extremely high tones penetrate particularly clearly. Schleidt was suddenly able to perceive what most people do not see: sounds in the ultrasound. "

After the end of the Second World War , Schleidt studied zoology and anthropology in Vienna and became one of the first employees at the Wilhelminenberg Biological Station, founded in 1945 by Otto Koenig and Lilli Koenig . His tasks included u. a. to raise a young kestrel that he had to feed with captured mice. When caught bank voles he noticed that they fiepten extremely high notes in the enclosure of the Falcon, but this neither Otto Koenig nor the time students also in Vienna Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt were able to confirm. Schleidt therefore decided to construct an apparatus with which he could convert high-frequency sounds into a frequency range that could be heard by everyone. In 1949, radio parts thrown away elsewhere were used to create his first functional apparatus for recording and registering high-frequency mouse sounds. With the help of a Galton whistle , he was also able to test the reaction of his mice to a man-made signal. He succeeded in proving "that the ultrasound is the language of the mice, [...] that the purpose of the beeping sounds is communication." Until then, the echolocation of bats was already known and that dogs can be guided through by whistling in the ultrasound range However , Schleidt's specialist publication Tones of High Frequency in Mice , published in 1948 , opened the door to a new area of ​​research, bioacoustics. The circuit diagrams of his apparatus were also published two years later. For his doctoral thesis, Schleidt examined bank voles a. a. innate trigger mechanisms in the communication between mothers and their newborns, which quickly made him an internationally recognized expert especially for ultrasound communication in rodents.

After Konrad Lorenz returned to his family villa in Altenberg in Lower Austria in 1948 from a Soviet prisoner of war , Schleidt was allowed to move in there and - initially unpaid - help convert the five-story building into a zoological institute. He was able to continue his studies on the subject of sound perception, but with Heinz Prechtl he also devoted himself to a completely different question: How do mammals manage to find the mother's breast? In May 1950, Prechtl and Schleidt described the now well-known "automatic search (swinging the head sideways)", a behavior pattern that is almost identical in mice, rats and babies. In 1950 Schleidt became a scientific assistant to Konrad Lorenz and together with him, Ilse and Heinz Prechtl and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, he first set up the Max Planck Research Center for Comparative Behavioral Research in Buldern / Westphalia and later the Max Planck Institute from 1955 to 1958 for behavioral physiology in Seewiesen . Schleidt was also responsible for handling many “bureaucratic” needs in Seewiesen for many years; he is also credited with inventing the place name Seewiesen for the area on the Eßsee . Schleidt researched here in the following ten years a. a. with the help of dummies , by means of which characteristics ducks , geese and turkeys recognize predators, and he analyzed the courtship movements of the turkeys. He published exemplary quantitative studies of innate behaviors, and his reflections on the role of signals in maintaining social bonds as "tonic communication" received special attention.

From 1965 to 1985 he was a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and head of the first ethological research group on the East Coast, which dealt primarily with bioacoustics and communication research. In 1985 he returned to Vienna and was director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative Behavioral Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences until 1992 . Since 1989 he has also been an associate professor at the University of Vienna , but since the end of the summer semester 2003 has only been available to students by email due to his hearing loss .

Schleidt was a loyal “friend” of Konrad Lorenz and after his death repeatedly spoke up in the discussion about his political past. Schleidt's criticism of the prevailing theories regarding the domestication of dogs and his reference to the possibility of coevolution between humans and wolves met with a surprisingly wide response in 2003.


As a “private scholar”, as he calls himself today, he works on his farm in Moosbrunn , Lower Austria .

Fonts (selection)

  • Schleidt, WM: Reactions to high frequency sounds in rodents. Die Naturwissenschaften 39 (3), pp. 69-70 (1952) doi: 10.1007 / BF00596819 .
  • Zippelius, HM; Schleidt, WM: Ultrasonic sounds in young mice. Die Naturwissenschaften 43, pp. 502-502 (1956) doi: 10.1007 / BF00632534 .
  • Schleidt, WM: Reactions of turkeys to flying birds of prey and attempts to analyze their AAM's. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 18, pp. 534-560 (1961) doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1961.tb00241.x .
  • Burkhardt, D .; Schleidt, WM; Altner, H .: Signals in the animal world. Heinz Moos Verlag, Munich (1966), 150 pages ISBN 3-89164-053-6 .
  • Knocker, PH; Schleidt, WM: Ecology and behavior. Psychological and ethological aspects of ecology. Fischer, Stuttgart (1968), 97 pp.
  • Schleidt, WM: How "fixed" is the fixed action pattern? Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 36, pp. 184-211 (1974) doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1974.tb02131.x .
  • Schleidt, WM; Crawley, JN: Patterns in the behavior of organisms. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 3 (1), pp. 1-15 (1980) doi: 10.1016 / 0140-1750 (80) 90016-0 .
  • Schleidt, WM; Yakalis, G .; Donnelly, M .; McGarry, J .: A proposal for a standard ethogram, exemplified by an ethogram of the bluebreasted quail (Coturnix-chinensis). Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 64 (3-4), pp. 193-220 (1984) doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0310.1984.tb00360.x .
  • Schleidt, WM: Learning and the description of the environment. In: Issues in the ecological study of learning, pp. 305-325 (Ed. Johnston, TD; Pietrewicz, AT). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey (1985).
  • As editor: Schleidt, WM: The circle around Konrad Lorenz. Ideas, hypotheses, views. Festschrift on the occasion of K. Lorenz's 85th birthday on November 7, 1988. Paul Parey, Berlin, Hamburg (1988), 206 pp., ISBN 3-489-63336-9 .
  • Schleidt, WM: Impressive uniforms: clothing as a signal. In: Kulturethologie. About the basics of cultural developments. Commemorative publication Otto Koenig, pp. 256-281 (Ed. Liedtke, M.). Realis Verlag, Munich (1994), ISBN 978-3-930048-05-2 .
  • Schleidt, WM: Epilogue: Who was the father of the gray geese really? In: I actually wanted to be a wild goose. From my life, pp. 97-122 (Ed. Lorenz, K.). Piper, Munich, Zurich (2003), ISBN 978-3-492-04540-7 .
  • Schleidt, WM; Shalter, MD; Moura-Neto, H .: The hawk / goose story: The classical ethological experiments of Lorenz and Tinbergen, revisited. Journal of Comparative Psychology 125 (2), pp. 121-133 (2011) doi: 10.1037 / a0022068 and doi: 10.1037 / a0022068.supp , full text (PDF) .

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Schleidt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d Schönberger, A .: Wolfgang Schleidt - The Tonmeister. In: Alwin Schönberger: Grenzgänger. Austrian pioneers between triumph and tragedy. Brandstätter Verlag (2015), ISBN 978-3850338974
  2. ^ Schleidt, WM: High frequency sounds in mice. Experientia: interdisciplinary journal for the life sciences 4 (4), pp. 145-146 (1948), doi: 10.1007 / BF02164342
  3. Schleidt, WM: Superposition amplifier for ultrasound. Radiotechnik 26, pp. 11-12 (1950)
  4. ^ Heinz Prechtl ; Schleidt, WM: Triggering and controlling mechanisms of the sucking act. 1st communication. Journal for Comparative Physiology 32 (3), pp. 257-262 (1950), doi: 10.1007 / BF00344527
  5. ^ Schleidt, WM: Tonic communication: Continual effects of discrete signs in animal communication systems. Journal of Theoretical Biology 42 (2), pp. 359-386 (1973), doi: 10.1016 / 0022-5193 (73) 90095-7
  6. ^ Schleidt, WM; Shalter, MD: Co-evolution of humans and canids. An alternative view of dog domestication: Homo Homini Lupus? Evolution and Cognition 9 (1), pp. 57-72 (2003), full text (PDF)
  7. ^ Schleidt, WM: Is humaneness canine? Human Ethology Bulletin 13 (4), pp. 1-4 (1998).
  8. ^ Schleidt, WM; Shalter, MD: Dogs and mankind: Coevolution on the move - An update. Human Ethology Bulletin 33 (1), pp. 15-38 (2018). Also on the Internet as: http://ishe.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/HEB_2018_33_1_15-38.pdf