11 Unexpected Accessories Designed for Experiments

Look into the "methods" section of any given animal experiment and you'll find descriptions ranging from the ghastly to the absurd. Researchers have crafted chicken goggles, tiny cardboard hats, and remote-control whale-snot collectors—all in the name of science.

The road to enlightenment has taken some pretty strange turns over the last century. Here are a few of the weirdest pit stops.

1. Custom Dinosaur Costumes

As any third-grader can tell you, dinosaurs never really disappeared; they just turned into birds. When a question of dinosaur behavior arises, researchers often look to the henhouse for answers. One recent experiment took a literal approach to the chicken-dinosaur relationship, strapping a group of young chickens with miniature dinosaur tails to find out how theropod dinosaurs walked.

The prosthetic tails were crafted from modeling clay and wooden dowels, painstakingly fitted to each chicken’s rear end and fastened with Velcro. The chicks started young with their costumes, which meant that they learned to walk like dinosaurs before they learned to walk like chickens.

2. Dung Beetle Hats

Marcus Byrne via Livescience

When you’re lost in the desert on a moonless night, how do you get your poop home? (N.B.: you’re a dung beetle in this situation.) You navigate by the endless, comforting light of the Milky Way, of course. Or at least you do until some meddling researcher comes along and obstructs your vision with a wee little cardboard hat. Then you get lost, and roll your poop-ball in aimless, meandering loops. And when the almighty researchers remove your cardboard blinders, you gratefully roll your poop homeward.

3. Lobster Love Hotel

You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but lobsters are actually quite particular. Unless the conditions are just right, it’s nearly impossible to get a lobster in the mood. For this information and much, much more (perhaps too much), we can thank marine biologist Jelle Atema.

Atema began his career as a crustacean matchmaker in the 1970s when the sex lives of lobsters were still shrouded in mystery. Burning questions included, “How do they do it?” “Who seduces who?”, and “Does a lobster have a penis?”

To find out, the team started a seawater laboratory, complete with bare 30-gallon tanks like the ones you’d see at the supermarket. The laboratory lobsters were not impressed, and what mating did occur was brief, perfunctory, and uninformative. Suspecting that the unsexy laboratory accommodations were to blame, Atema and his team constructed custom lobster love hotels, complete with gravel floors, decorative (and edible) hermit crabs, and even private rooms. The rooms, hand-crafted from concrete and cinder blocks, were just the right size for an amorous lobster couple, and the placement of the little love shacks against the glass front of the tank gave the lucky couple the illusion of privacy while providing a steamy show for the fascinated researchers.

Lobsters in the wild are nocturnal and do their wooing in the dark. Atema installed red darkroom-style lighting in the laboratory, which he switched on when the sun went down so his team wouldn’t miss a minute of in-tank action.

At last, the lobsters were satisfied in more ways than one, and in the seedy red light of the lobster love hotel, Atema got his answers: “It’s complicated”; “The females pick their mates”; and “Actually, they have two.”

4. Bug Backpacks

CSIRO

How do you know where a honeybee goes? Fit it with a tiny backpack. To understand why Australian honeybees survived while bee colonies around the world underwent massive collapse, scientists attached little sensors to 5,000 Tasmanian honeybees. First, the insects were refrigerated, which triggered a rest state. Researchers glued itty bitty RFID sensorsonto the groggy bees’ backs. Once they woke, the bees were released and flew back to their hive to resume daily life, reporting their whereabouts all the while. “This is a non-destructive process,” said lead researcher Paulo de Souza, “and the sensors appear to have no impact on the bee's ability to fly and carry out its normal duties.”

The bees were not the first insects to get the knapsack treatment. A 2010 Department of Defense study wired giant flower beetles with robotic backpacks, turning the bionic bugs into wireless, remote-controlled vehicles. A 2013 experiment attempted to unlock the mystery of dragonfly brains in flight as the backpack-burdened bugs buzzed around.

5. Jigsaw Jenny

On the other end of the sexual fussiness spectrum, you’ll find turkeys. Scientists and farmers have long marveled at toms’ (male turkeys) incredibly low standards for a female turkey's (a.k.a. Jenny) beauty. How low can those standards go? One research duo decided to find out.

The scientists built a sort of jigsaw-puzzle Jenny—a life-sized model of a female turkey that could be assembled and disassembled piecemeal. Jenny brought all the boys to the yard in spectacular fashion: When researchers removed her wings, legs, and feet, the toms still attempted to mate with her. The scientists removed her body next to no avail—even when Jenny was just a balsa-wood head on a stick, the males still found her irresistible. Bemused, the researchers took Jenny away and replaced her with the withered head of a decapitated female. The toms found this new Jenny equally enchanting and tried to mate with her, too. The researchers were forced to conclude that a beautiful face—or any face at all—is really all that matters to an amorous turkey.

6. Chicken Goggles

National Band

The eye of a chicken is a very special thing. A 1988 Cornell study found that nearsighted baby chicks wearing goggles with special lenses scored as well as their keen-eyed peers on a vision test. Just like humans, as long as they wore their glasses, the myopic chickens did fine. “It’s only when they take off the glasses that they’re embarrassed by the situation,” said researcher Howard C. Howland. Decades later, the chicken goggles study is still considered a turning point in the science of vision.

Chickens, as everyone knows, are a fearsome bunch. They have a bad habit of killing and eating each other at the slightest provocation. The sight of blood, or anything red, can drive a chicken to violence. Enter rose-colored chicken spectacles. When the whole world is pink, nothing looks red. To this day, poultry farmers around the world rely on chicken glasses to keep the peace.

7. Rat Casino

Thinkstock

Rats are wonderful animals. They’re smart and eager to please, and their brains bear remarkable similarities to those of humans. That’s why when a team of psychologists wanted to learn about people with gambling addictions, they erected a rat casino.

Like a granny feeding quarters into the one-armed bandit, the lab rats were quickly transfixed. The casino apparatus amounted to a cabinet full of levers that rewarded repetitive behavior with sugar pellets—but not all the time. With each failed attempt to win a pellet, the rats grew agitated, desperate, and more determined to try again.

The rats’ frustration was not entirely for naught. The team conducted a second study in the rat casino using what they learned the first time around to reduce test rats’ problem-gambling behaviors. The experiment was successful and the results may someday lead to treatments for humans battling addiction.

8. Shrimp Treadmill

Hell hath no fury like a political conservative who thinks his or her tax dollars are being misspent. When word got out that biologist Lou Burnett had built little aquatic treadmills for a shrimp experiment, the uproar was deafening. Mike Huckabee went on the record: “I don't want my shrimp going to the gym."

The study itself was a legitimate and worthwhile investigation into the effects of water quality on crustaceans’ ability to breathe (and therefore survive). The experimental design—unfortunately for the indignant researchers—was absolutely hilarious.

9. Star Wars, Special Locust Edition

Joining a swirling swarm of your peers is a lot harder than it looks—just ask any locust. To find out how individual locusts could navigate a rapid, kinetic swarm without smashing into each other, Dr. Claire Rind spliced together a special locust edition of Star Wars (Episode IV. Don’t worry). The video featured just the scenes of spacecraft in battle and in flight. Rind’s team put the TV on and tracked the eyes and nerve cells of their tiny audience as the bugs watched the space opera unfold.

Believe it or not, we can add the locust cinema to the list of absurd but important experiments. Dr. Rind later teamed up with engineers in Switzerland to develop a robotic locust that performed extremely well on crash-avoidance tests. The resulting programming has potential applications for automobile safety.

10. Remote-Control Whale-Snot Collector

Zoological Society of London

Whales are notoriously difficult to study in the wild. They dive deep, migrate hundreds of miles per year, and will not hold still to give blood samples. But no matter how hard it is, monitoring whale health is essential. These beautiful creatures are essential parts of marine ecosystems. To save them, we must understand them, and to understand them, we must get creative.

Creativity was the name of the game for Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, who understood that one whale fluid is almost as good as any other. She realized that unlike their blood, which is dangerous to collect, whales practically give their snot away each time they rise to the surface and clear their blowholes. The problem then became how to collect airborne whale snot. The solution? A remote-controlled helicopter strapped with a petri dish. The snot-collecting helicopter buzzed into a spout of whale gunk, did its job, and was on its way back to the lab before the whale even noticed.

11. Brady Barr’s Hippo Device

Speaking of collecting bodily fluids—have you ever tried bottling the sweat of a hippopotamus? (Please say no.) Brady Barr has. Bioengineer Christopher Viney has, too.

Hippos excrete an oozy red substance known as super-sweat that chemists believed might have antibiotic and UV-blocking properties. The only way to find out, reasoned Viney, would be to test the sweat. Unfortunately, the reality was even more complicated than it sounds. Viney initially collected his oily sweat samples from the floor of Bulgy the hippo’s enclosure at the Fresno Zoo. When elderly Bulgy died, Viney thought he was out of luck and raw materials. Enter madman/herpetologist/TV host Brady Barr and his hippo device. I’ll let David Letterman explain:

Barr’s attempts to join the hippo community were ultimately rebuffed, and he went away with no sweat samples save his own. At least we’ve got the whole thing on tape.