How And Why Do Crickets Chirp?
How and Why Do Crickets Chirp?
The cricket’s call, a sound familiar to almost everyone across the globe, can vary from isolated clicks to repetitive chirps to long trills. While the females are mute, most male crickets can be loud musicians, producing species-specific songs up to 100 decibels, about the same volume as a motorcycle or a power drill. They create their songs by a method that is very different from human vocalization.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31obox.html?_r=0
Cricket Wings Are Acoustic Instruments
Male crickets use specialized parts of their tough and leathery front wings to create sound in much the same way that you might use a musical instrument. Each front wing has a hard ridge running across it, and on the underside of the ridge is a file, a single row of stiff notches similar to teeth on a comb. At the outer tip of the file is a small bump called a scraper.
Movements Produce Sound
To make their distinctive sound, the male crickets lift their wings and rub them together, running the scraper of one wing across the file of the other. This action, similar to running your thumbnail down the tips of a comb, is called stridulation. It creates vibrations that are then amplified by a flexible membrane right next to the file. This section of the wing is known as the harp due to its …show more content…
If field crickets open and close their wings several times, it produces multiple chips. Longer, slower strums of the scraper may produce the trills characteristic of tree crickets. When a mole cricket calls, he may stand at the entrance to his burrow in the ground. This position boosts his song’s volume, just as you can amplify a cell phone’s sound by placing it in an open cup or can. Crickets chirp faster in warm weather, and the snowy tree cricket has even earned a reputation as a thermometer since you can count the number of chirps for 14 seconds and then multiply by 40 to get a close approximation of the Fahrenheit
The cricket’s call, a sound familiar to almost everyone across the globe, can vary from isolated clicks to repetitive chirps to long trills. While the females are mute, most male crickets can be loud musicians, producing species-specific songs up to 100 decibels, about the same volume as a motorcycle or a power drill. They create their songs by a method that is very different from human vocalization.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31obox.html?_r=0
Cricket Wings Are Acoustic Instruments
Male crickets use specialized parts of their tough and leathery front wings to create sound in much the same way that you might use a musical instrument. Each front wing has a hard ridge running across it, and on the underside of the ridge is a file, a single row of stiff notches similar to teeth on a comb. At the outer tip of the file is a small bump called a scraper.
Movements Produce Sound
To make their distinctive sound, the male crickets lift their wings and rub them together, running the scraper of one wing across the file of the other. This action, similar to running your thumbnail down the tips of a comb, is called stridulation. It creates vibrations that are then amplified by a flexible membrane right next to the file. This section of the wing is known as the harp due to its …show more content…
If field crickets open and close their wings several times, it produces multiple chips. Longer, slower strums of the scraper may produce the trills characteristic of tree crickets. When a mole cricket calls, he may stand at the entrance to his burrow in the ground. This position boosts his song’s volume, just as you can amplify a cell phone’s sound by placing it in an open cup or can. Crickets chirp faster in warm weather, and the snowy tree cricket has even earned a reputation as a thermometer since you can count the number of chirps for 14 seconds and then multiply by 40 to get a close approximation of the Fahrenheit