Singing Insects

You must have heard the shrilling sound of certain insects at night in the rainy season that passed by. Ever wondered where they have gone these days? Have they died or gone somewhere?

Many insects like crickets and grasshoppers are heard during the rainy days, i.e., late summer and early autumn. They make sounds and it is hard to locate the source of sound. It can irritate a person and they leave you with no other option than to tolerate their song.

During winter the grasshoppers and crickets slow down their activities and hide themselves in a suitable place such as cracks and crevices in the rocks etc.

Insects do not have the ability to regulate their temperature by generating body heat so they are ectothermic. They take on the temperature of their surroundings. You avoid going out of your home to play when it is very cold outside. Similarly these singing insects too find a quite place for themselves and stop activities to conserve heat.

In many cold countries, where winters are longer and freezing, adults and nymphs die. But how do they appear all of a sudden when the temperature rises? Yes, because when the winter ends, their eggs hatch into new crickets and grasshoppers. And they survive the winter season as eggs.

How will you know that the song whose source you are unable to identify is of a grasshopper hopping around outside or of a cricket’s? Well, crickets sing during the night and the grasshopper during the day. In movies to portray a scene of night, a background shrilling sound of cricket, called jhingur in Hindi is played.

Every cricket and grasshopper is not a singing insect. Only males sing to call females for mating or warding off other males. So when they sense the correct time for mating they start singing.

Now the big question is how do the singing insects sing? Do they have vocal cords in their necks as we do? It is strange but the sound which they produce is not generated by some vocal cords. They sing by rubbing together their two parts of the body.

Crickets rub together roughened parts of their wings. Grasshoppers rub their legs against their forewings. The legs of a grasshopper have a row of ‘tiny-pegs’ on them which they rub against the hard vein on their forewings.

What is even more strange is that these singing insects have ears on their first pairs of legs or on either side of their abdomen!

Singing of crickets is considered a sign of good luck in China. They are popular pets there and kept in cages. In some European countries particularly in Iberian Peninsula, Mexico, South East Asia people use ‘cricket fighting’ as a gambling sport.

What do the singing insects eat, do you know? Like different people eat different things, some prefer to eat non-vegetarian food and some eat vegetarian food. Similarly different singing insects eat different things. Grasshoppers are vegetarian but crickets eat small insects, plants and moulds.