Females respond most reliably to artificial stimuli that match their own species' song in both sound frequency and temporal pattern. By using computer-generated stimuli instead of the songs of actual males, researchers have learned what it is about a song that females find attractive.

The video Media:Cricket_acoustic_communication_tex_ptaxis_lowres.mpg shows a female cricket ( Gryllus texensis) walking on an air-supported styrofoam ball, in response to a model of her species' song played from a loudspeaker situated in the front left quadrant. Modern variations on this experiment have confirmed Regen's findings countless times. This was demonstrated some 100 years ago by Johann Regen (Regen, 1913), who showed that a female would approach a telephone receiver relaying the song of a male who sang in another room. A command neuron situated in the brain controls the operation of the CPG (Hedwig, 2000) the song pattern is produced when the singing command neuron is active, which presumably is the result of sensory and hormonal stimulation.įemale crickets can approach a distant singing male using only his song as a cue. This pattern is produced by a network of neurons in the central nervous system (a central pattern generator, or CPG) situated in the metathoracic and anterior abdominal portions of the ventral nerve cord (Schöneich and Hedwig, 2012). The songs of different species are distinguished both by sound frequency and by the temporal pattern, or rhythm, with which the individual notes are produced. Courtship songs of many species contain two types of note: some, generally of low amplitude, that are dominated by the same fundamental frequency as calling song and others, generally much louder, in which a higher harmonic is dominant.

In calling songs, the dominant frequency is usually the lowest harmonic (fundamental frequency) and, depending on the species, is generally in the range 3-8 kHz. Each scissoring movement of the two wings produces a single note or sound pulse, which consists of a series of harmonically related frequency components. Modified with permission from Bennet-Clark and Bailey, 2002 (Bennet-Clark, 1999). Figure 1: A: wing specializations for generating near-pure-tone sounds B: engagement of the plectrum of one wing with the file of the other wing.

Cricket sounds