The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Learning the sounds of different insects
Katy did? Katy didn’t. The evening chorus of Q&A wing scrapes is on. Add a multitude of stridulating tree crickets to the ambient katydid mix and the muggy night air is saturated with sound.
In the afternoon, there’s more — grasshoppers fiddling and the dentist-drill buzz of cicadas. It’s summer and these are its hot singers.
For some, it’s a chance to listen and learn. Ken Elkins, director of education at the Bent of the River nature sanctuary in Southbury, owned by Audubon Connecticut, said if you’re attentive, you can break the sound down to its different insects.
“Katydids are just starting here,’’ he said. “I’m trying to learn crickets.’’
“We’re hearing cicadas in the meadow,’’ said Diane Swanson, director of the Pratt Nature Center in New Milford. “Kids who aren’t experiences are a little bit afraid. We have to explain to them what it is.’’
For others, there’s a melancholy in the buzz and chatter.
“I hear my first katydid and I think ‘summer’s ending,’” said Ann Taylor, executive director on New Pond Farm in Redding. “In the spring, there’s all the bird song. But the days are getting shorter, the young birds are grown, and their fattening up for migration. It’s quiet. Things are changing.”
The reason for the noise is the same as wood thrush flutings and turkey gobbles. It’s to attract a mate.
“It’s reproductive calling,” said Gail Ridge, an entomologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. “It’s all about the love life of insects.”
All of these insects have this short period of time to make arthropod whoopee. The males die after mating. The females lay their eggs, fold their wings and call it a season.
Grasshoppers, katydids and crickets are all members of the order Orthoptera. Cicadas are in a different family, the order Hemiptera.
Katydids and crickets make their calls by rapidly scraping the lower part of their wings, which are rasped, against the upper part, which have a scraper. It’s called stridulation.
“It’s like a washboard,” Ridge said.
Only male crickets sing to serenade prospective mates. With some species of katydids, the females answer the males back.
Grasshoppers do the same thing, using their rear leg to scrape against the rough wing.
Male cicadas are different. They have organs called tymbals. When they contract them, there’s a snap. Contract very rapidly and the snap becomes a buzz.
Cicadas get lot of attention when there’s a sudden hatching of millions of them who have been maturing underground for long periods —13 years, 17 years. This summer, Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina are drowning in cicadas and cicada sounds
Connecticut had its deluge in 2013 and may have another in 2030. However, there are always some cicadas singing in the summer in Connecticut.
John Cooley, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut said the state has eight species of cicadas — some common, some rare.
What’s unknown is exactly how long a lot of these cicadas live underground before emerging. Every year, some show up.
“There’s always a rolling emergence,” said Laura Saucier, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection
Saucier also said what sounds like a continuous wash of night sound to us humans, isn’t.
“Different species sing at different times,” Saucier said. “It eliminates sonic overlap. The males want to be heard. You don’t want to be drowned out.”
But when they crickets and cicadas emerge, so do insect that hunt them.
There’s the grass-carrying wasp, also known as the window wasp.
Female grass-carrying wasps make a nest of grass in some nice protected place — sometimes, between a storm window and an inner window. Hence their other common name.
They then hunt crickets, stinging and paralyzing them. They bring them back to the nest, then lay an egg. When the egg hatches, the larval wasp feeds on the paralyzed, but still living, crickets until it’s ready to build a cocoon and emerge as adults in the spring.
Cicada wasps, which are large and fearsome in appearance but completely harmless to humans, do the same. The females dig an underground nest. Then they hunt and paralyze cicadas, filling the nest’s larder for their hatching infants.
Saucier said this may seem a little brutal, but like bobcats hunting rabbits, everyone has to live.
“That’s what ecosystems are about,” she said. “It like tiramisu. There are all these layers.”