What frequencies can insects hear

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Employing modern digital systems that can reproduce clicks and simulate insect echoes will assist in such studies. Some questions will be difficult to answer. An individual bat can modify at least some of its strategies through learning, whereas insect counterstrategies appear through the slower process of natural selection.

Does this mean insect strategies lag behind those of their predators? Perhaps not. The variability of an individual insect's antibat behaviors might be a response to the predator's ability to learn. Jensen, Niels Skals for comments on the manuscript. We also appreciate the comments of five anonymous reviewers. Acharya L. Fenton M. Echolocation behaviour of vespertilionid bats Lasiurus cinereus and Lasiurus borealis attacking airborne targets including arctiid moths.

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The influence of arctiid moth clicks on bat echolocation: Jamming or warning? The renown of this katydid rests not on its looks, though, but on its hearing. One Australian katydid has capitalized on its auditory prowess to capture prey in a very devious way : It lures male cicadas within striking distance by mimicking the female part of the cicada mating duet—a trick requiring it to recognize complex patterns of sound and precisely when to chip in.

That, too. Insect eyes and antennae stand out, but ears? Even the eagle-eyed could be forgiven for wondering if insects have them. Yet obviously, some must hear: The summer air is filled with the trills, chirps and clicks of lovelorn crickets and grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, all trying to attract a mate. Most are hard to spot, if not invisible, and in many cases insects produce and sense sounds so far beyond our own range that we overlooked their abilities entirely.

But with the advent of new tools and technologies, ever more examples are coming to light. Sensory biologists, acoustics experts and geneticists are working together to pin down how they all work, how and when they evolved, and why. These ancestral insects went on to diversify into more than , species, and while most remain as deaf as their ancestors, some gained the means to hear. Of the 30 major insect orders, nine at last count include some that hear, and hearing has evolved more than once in some orders—at least six times among butterflies and moths.

The , species of that most dazzlingly diverse group, the beetles, are almost all deaf, yet the few that have ears acquired them through two separate lines of evolution. All told, insect ears arose more than 20 separate times, a sure-fire recipe for variety. Among moths and butterflies, ears crop up practically anywhere, even on mouthparts.

The bladder grasshopper has an abundance of ears with six pairs along the sides of its abdomen. Those detectors occur throughout the insect body but evolution typically only modified a single pair—apparently, almost any pair—to perceive the airborne vibrations generated by sound.

From there on, each new attempt to forge ears went even further in its own direction as other structures were co-opted and reconfigured to capture, amplify and filter sound, extract the relevant information and convey it to the nervous system. In mosquitoes and fruit flies, sound causes fine antennal hairs to quiver. Some eardrums are backed by air-filled acoustic chambers, others by fluid-filled ones. The number and arrangement of sensory cells that detect and decode those vibrations—and the neurons that send the signals to the brain—also vary from ear to ear.

Some ears are relatively simple; others have extra bells and whistles linked to their lifestyle. Take the parasitic fly Ormia ochracea , which deposits its larvae on a particular species of cricket after identifying and locating it from its characteristic call.

Yet they take the prize for accurate location, thanks to an elastic band connecting the eardrums so they rock up and down like a seesaw, ensuring sound hits one ear fractionally later than the other. The first is a small, hard plate behind the eardrums; the second, a fluid-filled tube containing a line of sensory cells. The signal then travels in a wave along the tube and over sensory cells tuned to different frequencies—making this organ a miniature, uncoiled version of our own, snail-shaped cochlea.

The team has now gone on to show why female katydids are so good at finding a mate in the dark, even though their ears are close together not so close as those of the parasitic Ormia , but near enough to make pinpointing sound a sizeable challenge.

Our own ears lie on either side of our large heads and are far enough apart for a sound to reach them at different-enough times and loudness for the brain to compute and locate the source.

Katydids solved the problem again, in a unique way by enlarging a breathing tube that runs from a pore in the side of the chest to the knee; sound reaches the eardrums both from outside the body and from the inside via the tube. If how insects hear varies enormously, so does what they hear. Mosquito ears are good for maybe a meter; the many-eared bladder grasshopper can hear from a kilometer or more away. Cricket ears detect low frequencies; mantis and moth ears are tuned to ultrasound, way beyond anything humans or their dogs can hear.

But what drove evolution to turn stretch receptors into ears in the first place, and so bring sound to the insect world? In modern insects, one of the primary functions of ears is to hear the approach of a predator in time to take action and avoid it.