Insect Love Song

Insect Love Song: The night is alive with insects. To our human ears their song is mere cacophony, but it's actually a vast web of communication signals. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie decode the Insect Internet for the meanings behind insect songs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie
Cricket Douglas. That's your your nickname these days because of
your proficiency in the sport of cricket. No, no, no,

(00:23):
my chripping. Oh you're chirping. Yes, it's summer. This is
when I chirped. Yeah. I mean, you know we've talked
about before. We're social creatures. We want to fall in
line with what everybody seems to be doing. And if
you go out on a summer night, even in a
city of sprawling and is artificial in many places as Atlanta,
what do you hear at now? You hear this, this
constant cacophony, This just roar at times of insect life

(00:45):
in the trees and the grass hiding underneath your house,
just chirping away, cricking away, making all these crazy noises.
And you know, after a while, you just give up,
You fall in line, and you just start chirping at
the moon, chirping at the moon, dripping at the moon. Yeah,
it's true. That's what I love about summer is that
does bring on that cacophony of nature. Yeah, and if

(01:06):
you're like me, just grab a fresh jug of moonshine
and you go out onto your porch. You really get
to enjoy the sounds of nature. What you don't do that?
It's the South. We're in Georgia. You don't have moonshine.
Is this store about moonshine or is that are you
making this in your top? It is hand crafted moonshine
from my local artisan. Well that's that's the way to
do it. Then, yeah, yeah, it really is making it

(01:26):
come back by the way. Oh yeah, and it's you
have like, yeah, artisan um moonshine showing up people drinking
out of mason jars and all. Yeah it's quaint, but yeah,
I mean this is this is the time to really
enjoy that cacophony. And I did want to point out
before we start to talk about what some of this um,
these sounds of nature mean when we really eats drop

(01:48):
in closely, I did want to point out that crickets
are really huge in some parts of the world, particularly
in Japan. Bob Pemberton, he's an associate with the Florida
Museum of Natural History. He says that there's a rich
tradition of keeping singing insects, beginning with emperors who kept
them in cages in their courts, and he's sad. In fact,

(02:08):
there is a Buddhist temple near Kyoto with a meditation
room which terrariums filled with tree crickets, and the monkey
was taking him through this um meditation room said that
the voice of cricket is the voice of the Buddha. Well,
that's an interesting way of looking at I mean, certainly
there's something very meditative about these organic sounds, about about

(02:32):
bird song or certainly insects sounds. Um, you can you
can buy CDs filled with these kind of nature sounds
to help you relax. So it makes sense that before
the age of New Age meditation albums, you would just
stemp will simply put a handful of crickets in a
cage and uh stick that in your yoga in right. Yeah. Yeah,
Well apparently to like keeping crickets is a thing in Japan,

(02:54):
like you keep them in little cages or sometimes people
will drop them into their pockets so they can enjoy
the sound. Well, you know, growing up, I remember, and
I don't know to what extent this is like a
larger thing. If this is like a Southern thing or what.
But I always heard, you know, if you have a
cricket in your house, it's good luck. You're not supposed
to kill a cricket. At most, you're supposed to let

(03:16):
it go outside, which generally what I tried to do
with insects of any kind that wander into the house.
But specifically the cricket was was good luck, and it
was a bad omen if you squashed it. Did you
have this? I have never heard of this, never heard
of it ever. So not a Michigan thing. It's not
a Michigan thing. I mean, the only reference point I
have two crickets is my great uncle Louis mcgulley, who

(03:39):
used to cheap what was that last name, mcgulley from Chicologo,
who would keep a cricket in his pocket. But I
think he did that more as like just some sort
of parlor truck, like a real cricket. Or is this
like code for a handgun? A good question, but but
we'll go with a real crick He assuming he had
a real cricket, he kept a real cricket in his
pocket at all times. He did we defeat it. I

(04:01):
don't know. I just heard stories of us, and I
almostly mean that he replaced this cricket well quite often,
you'd want otherwise would just be heartbroking breaking to have
care that that cricket around with you all the time.
I should also point out, I'm of course talking about
the cute little black cricket and not the grotesque um
geeger esque humpback cricket camel cricket. That's funny, said, I

(04:21):
was about to say ena more. Yeah, because those those
are the ones that did generally live under the house
and then creep up into the surface world to gross
you out, or if you're a cat, enthrall you with
your jumping ability. Cats love them at them and I'm
sure they're full protein as well, it's true. Um, So
shall we lean in close and with the aid of

(04:43):
entomologists really eavesdrop on that comphony of nature? Yeah, because
to us it's cacophony. To it it were it at most,
it's sort of a serene musical performance that we that
we just kind of take in. But really what we
are hearing is acid communication in the insect and interact
need world. Um, mostly insect that we're hearing all of

(05:07):
the communications is going on at once. We can't understand it.
We don't know what they're talking about. Um, I mean
unless you study it. And we're gonna talk about some
of those studies here shortly. But but yeah, when you
start breaking it down, uh, these are actual communications. Uh.
Species talking to like species. Uh species warning enemies to
stay away from them. Species trying to confuse enemies. Uh.

(05:29):
Species trying to draw prey into their grasps uh species
or particular suitors trying to deal with rival suitors or
attractive may There's all sorts of stuff going on. Just
imagine like a million different emails or phone calls just
zipping through the sky invisible. And that's what's going on
in the insects song world. And there's no better insect

(05:49):
to start off with than cicadas, which we have covered before.
We talked about a cicadas and and that throng, that
humming that you hear in the trees that used to
to me sonify like the hottest parts of the summer
and decaying in death. But now now I look at
this song, is is this really actually beautiful symphony that

(06:10):
we're putting together. Well, let's hear a quick clip from
it from the Song of the Cicada U copyright Whenever
cicadas decided to cross of the ground originally, Uh, here
we go. Now, I agree with you that for me,

(06:32):
the sound of the cicadas, it's always just been a
part of a hot summer, just sweltering out and the
and the trees the forest around you are just throbbing
in the same way that the heat is throbbing. And
in the cyclical nature of the brood emergence. Also, it's
impossible not to to correlate that with with cycles of
life and death, you know, especially as the broods vanished

(06:56):
the cicada song vanishes, other things in your life may
van sure change as well, and then the cicada has
come back, and uh, and then there is something kind
of magical about that. Well, especially if you consider that
that brood is either thirteen years in the making or
seventeen years in making, you know, seventeen years underground. And
then they come out and they sing their very white
love songs that the males do to the ladies out there,

(07:17):
and they really do exist just to to reproduce and
die off. Yeah, And of course, as we discussed in
our we we didn't eos about cicada's a while back,
which people can can look up, but they sort of
an important purpose. You have all these nutrients that are
locked away in the ground when they're just when they
when they when they haven't emerged yet, and when they emerge,
they're bringing all those nutrients out into the world. So

(07:38):
it's feast day as well for birds, humans, even cats
of course, anybody who wants to get in on the
feast of the cicada. Yeah. You know, what's so fascinating
about that is that they're not quite sure how cicadas
are cued to come out after seventeen years. They think
it's weather related, but still it's a bit of a mystery.
But it turns out that there are some cicadas that

(08:01):
don't get the cue and they crawl out like a
year later, and there's like that lone cicada just you know,
that lonely little chirping. Yeah, we know, all right. There's
something like sadly poetic about like the one hippie cicada
showing up a would stock the year after, yes, yes,
saying hello, any ladies out there, and literally it's crickets.

(08:24):
So um. Mainly it is the males, of course making
the sound. It's worth noting that females can it can
also make sounds as well, though it's not the signature
sound that we've heard, and they often all make a
slightly different sound when they're warning you, hey, don't pick
me up, um, don't stick me in your pocket. That's
a different sound as well. Yeah. David Rothenberg, he is

(08:46):
an interspecies musician. He actually talks about this about the
very specific noises that they make, the song that they make,
and he says that whenever you hear a summer convergence
of Scatta's, you're really hearing nine separate sounds made by
three related species and they're all there at the same time.
And so you've got something called the magic Cicada cass

(09:08):
and i and that makes that swump swelling sound that
you kind of hear, and to me, that's the most
prominent sound um that you just hear that swell and
it just sounds like something is about to burst. And
then there's the Magicada semendicular and that's another species that
makes more of a percussive sound. And then the third
species is magic Cicada sept in sennial and this sounds

(09:32):
like Pharaoh like saying it's like fair, fair crow. And uh,
it's really cool because this is a three part process,
this mating call. That first sound, that that squoshing sound,
and this this whole process is just sort of attracting
the ladies and saying I'm right here, and the closer
they get together, the more the sounds change. And the

(09:56):
cool thing is that in these pauses between these sounds,
the female just flicks her wing as a way to
say here I am. Yeah, so that's kind of her
call in response. Of course, how how is this signature
male sound made? Um, the female sound that you mentioned,
that's just made by flicking their wings together. But the
males use a membrane and we call this membrane the

(10:17):
timble and really the best way and it's it's like
an on their abdomen. And in terms of describing what
the material looks like and how it generates the sound,
the best real world uh, well not real world, but
let's say artificial human world. Um uh. Analog that we
have is the bindy straw, you know, the bindy part
of the bindy straw, and it makes that signature noise

(10:42):
that is essentially what's going on, right, because the abdomen
is more like that accordion part that's air filled this
air filled sack, and then the tembles aren't either side,
and then you have these series of three to five
kings that excite a residence in the abdomen and that's
radiated as sound through the insects ear drums. This is

(11:02):
so cool that's located at the bottom of the abdomen.
The insects ear drums are at the bottom of the
abdomen um, so that creates this huge sound pressure that
acts as a sound converter, and then you have a
sound that is one hundred and eight decibels loud at
a one meter range. So just to give you guys
a little context up there, um, an alarm clock is

(11:23):
eighty decibles, a rock concert is a hundred and ten decibles,
in a thundercloup is a hundred and twenty decibles. It's
interesting that too, that the the cicadas actually tuned down
their own hearing via muscles to ensure that they're not
deafened by their own noises. Right. It's it's so if
you ever think what these guys are loud, that they
know it too, that's why they're having to tune down

(11:43):
to sing these songs. Um. So this year's World Science Festival,
they had a presentation titled the Cicada Serenades, Music, Mating
and Meaning and it was really good stuff. Um. It
was quite an adventure to get there because we had
to go all the way from Manhattan to to the
Bronx to the Botanical Garden there and we have like
an hour to do it. And it turns out and

(12:04):
New Yorkers may laugh at me for even thinking that
that was a reasonable amount of time to get all
the way up to the Bronx. Uh, we barely made it.
But but they they they they presented a really fascinating
presentation on cicada song and insects song. Rothenburger we mentioned
was there another individual we're gonna mention in a minute,
was there as well. One thing that they pointed out

(12:26):
is that we we don't really understand why some male
cicadas get lucky and others don't because they're all singing
this this, this song and uh, a number of you know,
countless other species out there in the world. We know
that they're mating. Display is like saying, hey, ladies, this
is what I have to offer, and the ladies go
which one has the best mating display, you know, sort

(12:48):
of like which which guy has the nicest car or
the coolest house or the most beautiful singing voice. But
but they don't seem to have any judgment along those lines,
like all the skata songs are basically the same, so
it remains a bit of a mystery. Yeah, and there's
so many of them, yes, um, And so you gotta wonder,
is this just a matter of proximity, you know, where

(13:10):
there are that many of them where it's just like, hey,
we have x amount of days here, it's team on us,
like ten days. We need to go ahead and do
that because we're going to be like dust. Pretty well.
They've been in the ground for a long time. So yeah,
maybe it's just proximity. And there's so many of them,
maybe they just realize we've we've got it figured out.
There's no need to be choosy guys, let's just do it.
So yeah, I mean, it's let's go back to woodstock.

(13:34):
It's one big woodstock, like you know, converging right, alright,
So let's take a quick break and when we get
back we will cover crickets, of course, but also an
insect that uses it's en us to make a noise
of gray labnoses. Alright, so we've talked about Okay, does

(14:02):
do you anything else to add about the cicada love songs? No,
just that it's reframed my my idea of what cicadas mean.
Now I think about tons of love making going on
when I hear that swell as opposed to deaf and
decay in the the summer storms coming on. Well, it
should be obvious cicadas are not the only creatures that

(14:23):
make make songs. Again, there are a countless varieties of
insects out there in the night or in even the day,
even creating all of these sounds. And we're going to
mention some of the other ones that are worth noting.
That's right, crickets. Okay, So a lot of people think
that crickets just rub their legs to make their iconic noise,
but they do not. Male crickets have a file on

(14:45):
one wing and a scraper or a plectrum on the
other wing. They rub the scraper with a file and
then that makes that chirping noise, which turns out to
be one hundred dest bulls by the way. Yeah, and
it's important you have that you mentioned the ridges too,
because it's not just a matter of like, oh, let's
say I've got a leg and I've got a wing
or or another, you know, insects I've got, I've got

(15:06):
a couple of legs. If you got a couple of wings,
I should just rub all this stuff together and see
what happens. Uh No, it's it's much more deliberate than that.
There is one ridge moves against another ridge, and that
is uh, that is what creates the noise. Yeah. And uh,
I did want to point out something called mull crickets
here because they sort of up the game and they
use a burrow to act as an acoustic device and

(15:29):
then radiate sound much like you would with a megaphone.
So they basically make their own amphitheater for their performance. Yeah.
And when I say megaphone, that really that's way too
simple of an explanation because really they're they're acoustic setup
is far more nuanced and complex than that. Yeah. And
occasionally you do encounter insects that accidentally benefit from acoustic residents. Um,

(15:50):
if you have have anyone who's ever had a bug getting
your ear. I think there's a app Also there's proximity
to the noise that's going on there as well. But
there they have their own amphitheater. And uh once I
had a click bug crawl into a picture frame. So
it was in there and like just the right spot,
and it was exceedingly loud. It took me for every
to figure out what it was. I thought there was

(16:10):
like somebody in the wall tapping on something click the bug. Yeah,
like a click click beetle type thing. Okay, pop, you know,
and if they have something to pop against and then
if that can resonate, then it becomes this whole different performance.
It's true, and it is a performance. Uh. For instance,
grasshoppers like the cricket, they use this what's called stride
stride eulation that's the scraper, and they used the scraper

(16:34):
on these little pegs on their hind legs. Yeah, which
kind of reminded me again of moon shine and making
music and you know, using a washboard to make some
sort of sound. Like I am instantly imagining like grasshoppers
in crickets all setting around playing like string instruments and
playing the jug maybe and drinking menshine to the point
where I must have seen that somewhere. Maybe that exists,

(16:57):
probably in a Pixar movie or it should be. But
to your point, a lot of people don't realize that
crickets and grasshoppers are making their their sounds via completely
different methods. Yeah, and and speaking of completely different methods,
what if this guy showed up to the cricket and
grasshopper party. Um, this is called the micronecta Scholtzi, also

(17:18):
known as the singing penis. It is a freshwater insect
and it measures just two millimeters across. It's common across Europe,
so maybe some of our European listeners will will know
about the singing penis. And now this is not a
singing penis in the in line with Steve Martin sketch
if you remember this, uh, I think it was a
Saturday Night live bit that he did. I don't know.

(17:40):
He would he would end sip his pants and there's
a microphone and it's like singing, and then he would
actually he would smoke a cigarette with it as well.
That was part of the act. Was it kind of
like a ventriloquist act? Yeah, it was kind of supposed
to be like that, like like he was very um, dignified.
It was very much in the style of let's say,
the fartist that we've talked about before, you know, Um,
but I'm pretty sure was Saturday Nightlife Skin. I'm sure

(18:01):
it's on YouTube somewhere. Um, but but that is not
what's happening here. With the penis. We're seeing another example
of this stridulation that we've been talking about again. It's
one it's one part of the body rubbing against the other. Um.
I mean really, when you hear all that noise in
the in the the insects song in the forest, you're
just hearing a great rubbing of parts, It's true. And
in this part is it is the penis part, and

(18:23):
it's a ridge on our penis, which then is rubbed
against a ridge on the surface of their abdomen. And
this is so trippy. The surface area is roughly the
width of a human hair, and it is producing a
noise of like two decibels. This is incredibly loud. I mean,

(18:43):
this is like the equivalent of listening to a loud
orchestra play if you're in the front row. Yeah, like
just a freight train barreling by now Luckily, these guys
live in the water, so of the sound is muffled
by their by their natural habitat, but you can but
they're still pretty loud out if you're walking by and
they're they're in the water. And these guys are pretty
common throughout Europe, I believe. Yeah, yeah they are. And

(19:06):
uh so that of course leads us to a really
wily insect, and this is the tiger mom Yeah. These
other insects we've been talking about, they're largely talking to
each other. It's largely a matter of mating or occasionally,
as with this Kida's saying, get your hands off of
me and put me back in that tree so I
can do it. Um. But in this case, the tiger
moth is doing doing something a lot more subtle and

(19:28):
a lot more fascinating. Yeah, I mean, because it's talking
to another species. Uh specifically it's predator, a bat, and
it is making its little song. They think, our researchers think, uh,
it could be one of three theories. One is that
it's saying, hey, guess what, I'm poisonous. You probably don't

(19:48):
know this at night because you can't see any but
other people these daytime people they know that this these
markings on my wings, they indicate that I'm poisonous. But
since it's evening and you can't see this glorious pattern
on my wings, I'm just gonna tell you. So they
think that that could be one reason, uh for the
noise it makes. The second theory is that it's could
be jamming the bats sonar m. And then the third

(20:12):
theory is that it's kind of saying boo to the
bat um and in a sort of acoustic warning system,
I know you're here. Yeah, Like you know, the bat's
kind of honing in, hunting in and then or homing
in and it says, oh, hey, I'm here, and then
the bat kind of gets freaked out. And this is
called a startle response. And this is something that Ron

(20:32):
Hoy talks about um in some of his papers. He
was on the panels NY. He was on the panel.
He was great because he brought a number of acoustic
instruments with him, because I mean you also had David Rothenberg,
who again he is amazing. He's a philosopher, a musician
and author um in New Jersey, I believe, and he
um he's all about like taking natural sounds in the

(20:53):
world things, sounds of insects, the sounds of whales, and
the doing of his own stuff. So he actually had
a container or of cicadas. He has taken him out,
sticking him on the microphone, and then he's playing like
an alto sacks. And then he had this fabulous percussionists
there that was doing kind of um my, my musical
knowledge isn't sufficient enough to describe it, but very um

(21:15):
this guy's percussion would not have been out of place
in a yoga studio or or or it's some sort
of tribal kind of performance. So it was it was
a very very cool little little gig you put together there.
But then yeah, Hoy brought all these different woodwind instruments,
not woodwind, um would percussion instruments to to demonstrate the
different forms of stridulation that go on with these different insects. Okay,

(21:40):
so you can kind of get the idea of the
frequency or the length. Yeah. So by the end of
it you had Rothenberg performing and then Hoy had passed
out all of his his toys to the other panelists
and they were all strumming or or or shaking or
rubbing sticks together to make the kind of jam with
the insects again the woods suck just came out? Yeah, yeah,

(22:02):
with the insects comes out would suck. Um. What I
like about David Rothenberg is that he has described as
an interspecies musician and there's actually a great radio lab
with him, and it's talking more specifically about Cicada's but
also about some of his work with the clarinet in
whales in this sort of column response that happens between

(22:23):
him and whales when he's playing the clarinets really interesting.
So there you have it. It's just an insight into
some of the sounds going on out there. Certainly not
all of them, and there are a number of other
creatures that that have some really interesting sounds going on.
It's worth noting the mosquitoes when they will twining. You
heard those of the lady mosquitoes, uh talking and and
potentially trying to mate as well with their insects. Song

(22:45):
jumping spiders have some phenomenal singing dancing routines that they
do that we can't hear with with our with our
ears without the actually uh you know, amplifying the sound,
but it's still fascinating. Be sure to look up some
videos of that if you haven't seen it. Uh. Yeah,
hopefully everyone will think a little a little bit differently
about the insect a company in the night, because it's

(23:06):
it's not just a background noise, you know, it is,
it's this massive communication and uh. And that the sounds
are being produced at a very small level, uh, with
some with some really interesting instruments. Indeed, and if you
want to check out some more insect sounds, go to
BBC's program called Nature in the episode is called Insect

(23:28):
Soundings and you can get some more clips of various
other insects and their role in nature. Uh. If you
have something you would like to share with us, if
you'd like to talk about what the cada sound sounds
mean to you, what insect sounds mean to you? What
what is your relationship with crickets? Did you grow up
hearing that they were good luck and them in your house?
Do you keep them a little cages? Do you keep

(23:48):
them in your pocket? Uh? Let us know. We'd love
to hear from you. You can find us in a
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Mind dot com, and you can always drop us a
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(24:10):
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