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The insect orchestra: From meadow melodies to riverside rhapsodies
Summer is a busy, noisy time for insects. The season’s long, sunny days are filled with their sounds. Crickets are singing loudly to serenade a mate, the calls of water boatmen are reverberating around the riverbanks and bumblebees are causing quite the buzz. The night too is alive with sound, listen closely and you might hear a little squeak from an unlikely source, a moth.
We’re taking a look at who's hitting the high notes in the insect orchestra and how despite their small size, they sure know how to make themselves heard.
The cricket’s courtship chorus
During the summer months, the male cricket will tirelessly repeat a noisy phrase in the hope of enticing a female to mate with.
They make this noise by rubbing their forewings together, which produces vibrations that resonate out of their bodies as sound. This is called stridulation.
When it comes to catching the attention of females, males have a few different calls they use. The first call they make is a long-distance call to reach out to any females in the area.
The next call is a courtship song, which they perform when a female gets close enough to warrant the extra effort to impress. This song is made up of higher frequency 'ticks'. Female crickets tend to prefer to mate with males that can call for longer in a given bout.
Another call made by the male cricket is an aggressive signalling sound, which they make when competing with other males that are close by. Next time you’re out and about, listen out to see if you can hear the crickets chirping away.
A Roesel's bush-cricket looking for a mate on a summer's day © IanRedding/ Shutterstock
Too noisy to make good choices
Researchers have found that in cities and towns, traffic noises are drowning out the songs of male crickets, making it hard for females to assess the quality of the males.
The challenge for the male cricket is to produce a noise that not only travels a long way but also rises above any background noise. Even in quieter conditions, it's not easy to clearly project a noise that can travel long distances, especially given the size of the cricket. In urban areas, where there’s a lot of road and industrial noise, it becomes even harder.
In 2021 a study found that high levels of human-made background noise made it difficult for female crickets to properly hear the male's song, leading them to make poor partner choices. The researchers fear that this could have a negative effect on the quality of future cricket generations.
Nature Overheard
Want to be a nature sound sleuth for science? Make recordings of nature sounds by a roadside near you and help scientists gather the data we need to make roads better for nature.
Small but mighty, a lesser water boatman makes the loudest sound of any animal relative to its size © Ben Price
The lesser water boatman’s penis orchestra
Despite their small size, insects sure make themselves heard. The male lesser water boatman, at just a few millimetres in length, produces the loudest sound made by any animal relative to its body size.
In a bid to attract a mate, it rubs its penis-like reproductive organ, known as an aedeagus, against its abdomen to make a loud snapping sound. The sound produced is a staggering 99.2 decibels, which is equivalent to standing 15 metres away from a passing train or sitting in the front row of an orchestra in full swing. This intense call, which the water boatman makes underwater, has three different parts to it, each with a different amplitude.
When transferring from the water to the air, 99% of the sound is lost, yet despite this, it’s still so loud that you can hear it from the riverbank. Next time you’re down by the river see if you can hear this penis symphony.
If you’ve never heard a lesser water boatman's call, take a listen below.
A death's-head hawkmoth makes an unusual squeak when irritated © LFRabanedo/ Shutterstock
The death's-head hawkmoth's squeaky symphony
If you saw a death's-head hawkmoth in the Middle Ages you’d likely have been terrified of it given that back then it was considered to be an omen of death due to the skull pattern found on its head. You might even have let out a squeal at the sight of it. When threatened or upset, this moth also makes a squeaky noise.
To make this sound, the moth sucks air into its face and over its tongue, or proboscis, which vibrates making a sound. It then pushes the air out again, making another sound, just like an accordion. Squeaky sounds produced this way are rare in the insect world, being made only by a couple of species of hawkmoth.
What the buzz? © Starsphinx/ Shutterstock
The bumblebee’s bloom-busting buzz
In the summer months, our gardens, parks and hedgerows are full of flowers in full bloom. To make the most of this abundance of pollen, bumblebees make a specific buzz that shakes as much of it as possible from the flower.
Known as buzz pollination, it’s just one of the types of vibration made by the bee. When buzz pollinating, the bee will usually fold its wings and vibrate its body.
It’s thought that bees might even have enough control over their muscles to vibrate their bodies in different ways depending on the type of flower and how much pollen it holds. Changing its buzz to match the flower means the bee can shake out the most pollen each time.
