Describing the exhibit, Rader claims that 'The Watchful Grasshopper parted company with what came before it in one very important way: it asked visitors to engage with its animal subjects by playing the role of scientific experimenter.' (177) It 'featured a live grasshopper, under a dome, with a wire electrodes inserted into its ventral nerve cord... This procedure, explained the signage, did not make the grasshopper uncomfortable and allowed visitors to explore the grasshopper's visual field, in order to determine what triggered impulses in the insect. The electrodes were hooked up to measuring devices that were also a part of the display: an oscilloscope, which recorded extracellular signals in the grasshopper's brain, and ampliufying speakers, which allowed visitors to hear, not merely see, the oscilloscope's activity as it "clicks."...

The relative sophistication of the grasshopper exhibit setup, combined with the fact that it featured a live animal, presented significant challenges for its creation. First, although [exhibition designers] Carlson and Shaw settled quickly on Schistcerca nitens as the insect that would most clearly illustrate the relationship between neurological stimuli and animal behaviour for visitors, its status as an agricultural pest in California meant that the insects were nearly impossible to acquire through commercial means. This forced staff members into temporary careers in grasshopper husbandry, breeding whatever grasshoppers would be used in the display. Exhiobit builders promptly incorporated their newly acquired knowledge of grashopper husbandry into the exhibit. Carlson created a supplementary display explaining the grasshopper's life cycle, featuring the museum's grasshopper colony and the exhibit designer's scientific knowledge of behaviour and husbandry.' (181-182)

'When it was first mounted, biologists and fellow museum workers hailed The Watchful Grasshopper and other similar life science displays as a "tour de force of exhibit construction."... Carlson... received numerous requests to create instructions so university teachers could replicate The Watchful Grasshopper and a host of other displays that the Exploratorium had regrouped into a broader exhibition, The Language of the Nerve Cells. Local medical school physiology professors brought their classes to use the Exploratorium biology displays as laboratory experiments. Biology undergraduate students suggested additions that would make the exhibits more useful for their own research.

But although popular with scientists, these displays did not draw the same response from the broader public: according to an in-house study only about 5 percent of the Exploratorium's 560,000 annual visitors interacted with the displays. Further, visitors drew conclusions about science and animal behaviour from the museum's exhibits, but these conclusions did not always echo those drawn by the Exploratorium's own staff and the broader scientific community.' (183-184)

'As a matter of pedagogical phiolosophy, Exploratorium exhibits intentionally excluded broader political and cultural discussions of science and its methods. Oppenheimer actively disavowed exhibits whose lessons could be easily applied to social issues...

[Yet] Those visitors committed to the expansion of animal rights were unconvinced by Oppenheimer's reasoning, and not easily converted to a purely rationalist perspective. In the case of The Watchful Grasshopper.... the comparison between animals and humans generated controversy and actively disrupted the museum's pedagogical mission... Ultimtely, many Exploratorium visitors concluded that the museum prioritized scientific discovery over the preservation of animal life - even when the animal life in question was not a charismatic mega-fauna but belonged to an agressive agricultural pest insect.' (185-186)

'this extraordinary display had a relatively short life on the science museum floor... it was removed from the Exploratorium sometime in the mid-1980s.' (187)