Imagine that you're a cricket happily chirping away. What if your mating song begins to attract a deadly enemy? Would you continue to call out? Or would you hush up, hoping to slip quietly under the radar?
For the past 20 years, Robin Tinghitella, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Denver in Colorado, has been studying a species of field cricket in Hawaii. She has observed them abandon their signature chirp and fall silent to avoid detection by predators. The crickets were thought to have lost their song for good, until a recent discovery by Tinghitella turned what we know about crickets upside-down and uncovered a new type of song-one that is curiously cat-like in nature.
WHEN I THINK OF FIELD CRICKETS, I IMMEDIATELY THINK OF CHIRPING NOISES.
A lot of people often think that crickets rub their legs together to chirp. They're actually using their wings!
WHY DO THEY MAKE THAT NOISE?
Only male crickets make noise, and they're usually using it to call for a female mate. Females don't have any of the wing structures needed to chirp or vibrate. In fact, females don't even have the behavior of rubbing their wings together that creates the chirp.
SO, MALE CRICKETS HAVE UNIQUE WING STRUCTURES THAT THEY RUB TOGETHER TO PRODUCE A CHIRP?
They have what we call a file and scraper system on their two forewings. [Crickets have two sets of wings including forewings and hindwings.] The file is a modified wing vein that has all these evenly spaced-out "teeth” on it, like a saw. A sound is produced when the file comes in contact with the scraper on the paired wing. We call that rubbing wing motion "stridulation."
DO ALL CRICKETS CHIRP THE SAME?
Esta historia es de la edición April 2022 de Muse Science Magazine for Kids.
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Esta historia es de la edición April 2022 de Muse Science Magazine for Kids.
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Who's Your Cousin?
The great apes are among the most popular animals in most zoos. Their actions, facial expressions, and family life remind us so much of ourselves. Have you ever wondered, though, how we might look to them?
Is it possible to die of boredom?
To figure out if we can die of boredom, we first have to understand what boredom is. For help, we called James Danckert, a psychologist who studies boredom at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
THE PROBLEM WITH PALM OIL
Palm oil is all around you. It’s in sugary snacks like cookies and candy bars. It’s in lipstick and shampoo and pet food.
SERGE WICH
Serge Wich’s favorite days at work are spent out in the forest, studying orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo or chimpanzees in Tanzania.
ELODIE FREYMANN
When you’re feeling sick, it probably doesn’t occur to you to try eating tree bark.
Guardians of the Forest
EARLY, MAKESHIFT WILDLIFE DRONES HELPED TO DETECT AND PROTECT ORANGUTANS.
APE ANTICS
The Whirling World of primate play
Dr. Ape Will See You Now
HUMANS AREN’T THE ONLY PRIMATES THAT USE MEDICATION.
THE LEFT OVERS
A lot has happened for modern humans to get to this point. We lost most of our hair, learned how to make tools, established civilizations, sent a person to the Moon, and invented artificial intelligence. Whew! With all of these changes, our bodies have changed, too. It’s only taken us about six million years.
SO, WHAT IS A PRIMATE?
What do you have in common with the aye-aye, sifaka, siamang, and potto? If you said your collarbone, you re probably a primatologist—a person who studies primates. If you’re not, read on.
