How to silence a cricket
Among the things that strike mind when thinking all but night are darkness, the moon, bedtime, and, in many places, chirping crickets. The list may soon pose shorter in the lowlands on the Island island of Kauai, where flies have targeted a type of cricket that originally came to Hawaii from the western Pacific.
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| These cricket-stalking flies, known atomic number 3 Ormia ochracea, are about the size of houseflies but experience big red-faced eyes and fly at dawn or dusk. The flies pinpoint the root of a cricket chirp, and a female deposits larvae on the unlucky songbird. As a result, male crickets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai are falling silent. |
| R. Hoy and G. Haldeman |
Only male crickets chirp. They have special parts along their wings that, when scraped against each different, make a noise.
In the 1990s, a certain type of flee began hunting Polynesian field crickets found on Kauai, says Marlene Zuk of the University of California, Riverside.
These flies imbed their babies in the bodies of crickets. The larvae use the crickets American Samoa food for thought, and the crickets eventually die.
Because male crickets make so much noise, they'Ra easy to locate and suffer the most. So, within 5 age, the male crickets stopped chirping almost entirely, Zuk says.
Aside 2003, the cricket universe had started increasing again, she reports, but solely a couple of of the males had wings with chirping parts that still worked.
"What surprises me most is that the cricket birdsong went inaccurate thus fast," says Ron Barge of Cornell University, who also studies flies and crickets.
The change is an example of survival of the fittest, which is part of the process of evolution. In this case, chirping was a bad quality for a cricket to have on Kauai Island, and cricket numbers were dropping.
A factor or two happened to change, or mutate, so that the cricket wing couldn't tweedle any longer. In just about places, this change would take up damned the mutated crickets. But on Kauai, faced with deathly flies that could zero on the reasoned, the mutated crickets thrived and passed the changes on to their young. Now, these inarticulate crickets are the main type of cricket on the island.
Alas for male crickets, their only way of attracting females is by chirping. For now, the silent males cluster around the a few left over chirpers systematic to cope with female crickets.—E. Jaffe
Going Deeper:
Milius, Susan. 2006. Crickets along mute: Hush falls as killer fly stalks singers. Science News 170(Sept. 23):197. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060923/fob5.asp .
For more almost crickets, go through www3.telus.net/~ecade/CricketsintheClassroom/
cricketsintheclassroom.html (Elsa Salazar Cade). William Cade and Elsa Salazar Cade ascertained the song-tracking pilot in 2022 and were the first gear to composition that the female fly follows cricket chirps to deposit larvae on a male.
You tin read many more or less the cricket-stalking fly Ormia ochracea and its remarkable hearing at World Wide Web.utsc.utoronto.calcium/~amason/Ormia.htm (University of Toronto), www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/
1999/jul/990712.ormia.html (NPR), and nut.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormia_ochracea (Wikipedia).
Science project idea: What factors affect the rate at which a cricket chirps? Info most raising crickets can be found at hobbyscience.com/bug.html (HobbyScience).
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