Why Crickets Just Won't Shut Up | Deep Look
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ม.ค. 2020
- Male crickets play tunes non-stop to woo a mate or keep enemies away. But they're not playing their song with the body part you're thinking.
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Ask most people about crickets and you’ll probably hear that they’re all pretty much the same: just little insects that jump and chirp.
But there are actually dozens of different species of field crickets in the U.S. And because they look so similar, the most common way scientists tell them apart is by the sounds they make.
“When I hear an evening chorus, all I hear are the different species,” said David Weissman, a research associate in entomology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Weissman has spent the last 45 years working to identify all the species of field crickets west of the Mississippi River. In December, he published his findings in the journal Zootaxa, identifying 35 species of field crickets in the western states, including 17 new species. California alone hosts 12 species. But many closely resemble the others. So even for one of the nation’s top experts, telling them apart isn’t a simple task.
“It turns out song is a good way to differentiate,” Weissman said.
--- How do crickets chirp?
On the underside of male crickets’ wings there’s a vein that sticks up covered in tiny microscopic teeth, all in a row. It’s called the file. There's a hard edge on the lower wing called the scraper.
When he rubs his wings together - the scraper on the bottom wing grates across all those little teeth on the top wing. It’s like running your thumb down the teeth of a comb. This process of making sound is called stridulation.
--- How do crickets hear?
Crickets have tiny ears, called tympana on each of their two front legs. They use them to listen for danger and to hear each other calling.
--- Why do crickets chirp?
Crickets have several different types of songs that serve different purposes. The familiar repetitive chirping song is a mating call that male crickets produce to attract females that search for potential mates.
If a female makes physical contact with a male he will typically switch to a second higher-pitched, quieter courtship song.
If instead a male cricket comes in contact with another adult male he will let out an angry-sounding rivalry call to tell his competitor to back off.
---+ Read the entire article on KQED Science:
ww2.kqed.org/science/2020/01/...
---+ For more information:
Professor Fernando Montealegre-Z’s bioacoustics lab
bioacousticssensorybiology.wee...
David Weissman’s article cataloging field crickets in the U.S.
www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/artic...
---+ Shoutout!
🏆Congratulations 🏆to the following fans on our TH-cam community tab for correctly identifying the name and function of the kidney bean-shaped structure on the cricket’s tibia - the tympanum, or tympanal organ:
sjhall2009
Damian Porter
LittleDreamerRem
Red Segui
Ba Ri
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Does this explain when I flirt, all I hear is crickets?
A couple of weeks ago, one of these guys got into our apartment. He was incredibly annoying. Flirt somewhere else.
these bugs immediately fall silent when I look at the general direction their noise comes from.
I always thought they did it with their legs (:
Who's here? Because you hear some crickets noise in your house
I love how unlike other male insects where they would fight for their mate, crickets will just throw insults at each other.
Every. Single. Night. I hear the crickets chirping.... Does that mean I heard a dating call every single night??
How did they evolve to become so noisy? Won't they easily be spotted as food by other animals and insects?
My gossiping family is like a bunch of crickets. Always chirping in the background but when you get close, they shut up.
It's funny how some of the sounds we find pretty or atmospheric, like birds' singing and these crickets' chirping, roughly translate to desperate howlings of "I need sex in my life." What a wonderful world it must be.
3:02
Me as a kid with a comb:
Someone:
I can't imagine being able to talk to animals. All night I would hear,
So the sound that puts me to sleep is a call for love.
"It's called a tympanum"
I swear it's only cute AF when they're outside, not when they're inside my house at 1 in the morning when I got a shift to wake up to.
when I was a kid I remember being fascinated by the sound a comb makes when you rub against the bristles. my mind is kind of blown learning that crickets are doing the same thing, at a much smaller and faster level! as always, thanks Deep Look for this wonderful video ♡
There is a good reason to have noisy crickets living around you at least in the midwest of the U.S.. When there is extreme weather like a tornado the crickets will go silent way before you hear the roar of the tornado. I've through 7 tornadoes in my life time each time they go silent around 3-5 minutes prior to it arriving. It helped when one time the sirens went out due to a massive power failure the crickets going silent was the only warning we had to find shelter from a F3.
Me: *Watching innocent chirps