AUTHOR: MATT SIMON
06.01.18
09:00 AM
THIS WOULD BE a whole lot
harder if biologist Gail Patricelli didn’t have an excellent sense of humor.
Because I’m expected to sit here like a professional and not guffaw at her
invention: A real-life fembot, which is probably not what you’re imagining but
instead a taxidermied bird
stuck on wheels. It tears around a table in her lab, turning its head back and
forth, stopping periodically to bend up and down, as if pecking at the ground.
Patricelli laughs as she steers it around, which I take to mean I’m allowed to
laugh too.
The fembot (Patricelli’s name for
the contraption) is serious science, though, a machine that’s helping her tease
apart the wild—and wildly complex—mating ritual of the sage grouse, a species
under threat. Because it turns out it’s pretty easy to trick a male sage grouse
into trying to mate with a robot.
The male sage grouse is perhaps
the only thing more absurd than a female robotic sage grouse. When they gather
to display in a mating arena known as a lek, they sound more like sci-fi than
anything remotely bird-like—a shreeet of a passing laser blast, and a
low pop of, well, your guess is as good as mine (see video above). Males also
inflate patches of thin skin on their chests. “They have a whole bunch of
muscles on their chest that allows them to manipulate this like an elaborate
balloon animal show,” Patricelli says.
Females are comparatively drab,
which makes turning one into a convincing robot easier, though far from simple.
It begins with a specimen that met an unfortunate end by way of car or
powerline. Meaning, it’s going to need some reconstructive surgery. “I do my
best to try to make it look realistic,” Patricelli says. “I have learned a lot
and spent a lot of time in the arts and crafts section.”
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