Insect field note
Music made of wings
The Cricket's Nighttime Song
A cricket doesn't sing with its mouth at all; it makes its chirping song by rubbing a pair of special wings together.
Let's look closer
How can wings make a sound like a song?
ne wing has a rough, ridged edge called a file, like a tiny comb, and the other wing has a hard scraper called a plectrum; rubbing them together quickly, sometimes dozens of times a second, makes the chirp you hear echoing through a summer night. Because crickets are cold-blooded, their muscles work faster in warmer temperatures, so they chirp noticeably faster on hot nights and slower as the air cools down. This relationship is so reliable that some people count chirps over a set number of seconds and use a simple formula to estimate the outdoor temperature fairly accurately.
Look for this
Explorer clue
On a warm evening, sit quietly outside and count how many chirps you hear in fifteen seconds; add thirty-seven for a rough guess at the temperature.
Your turn to wonder
Curiosity question
If your own happiest sound was made by rubbing two ordinary things together, what would you choose?
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