Behold the simple cricket, a member of the order Orthoptera. The chirping of a cricket, heard HERE is called stridulation. You can supposedly tell the temperature by counting cricket chirps. Count the number of chips from one cricket in a 15 second period and then add 40 for the temperature in Fahrenheit.
I tried this with the crickets my son keeps for his gecko. I figured these would be an ideal testbed for this theory because they chirp a lot. They chirp A LOT.
The one noisy cricket chirped 13 times in 15 seconds, meaning it should have been 53 degrees in my craft room. (Yes, my son has decided they need to live in my craft room so he can get to sleep at night). It was, in fact, 77 degrees, so I guess our crickets just shot that theory all to hell. Either that, or there is a tremendous temperature gradient between my craft room and the thermostat in the adjacent play room.
They are persistent little things. They do not stop chirping. Ever. They are supposed to be nocturnal, but we are lucky and continue to get the rare 24-hour, neverneedstosleep variety of cricket. Dear Leggo the gecko. May you be very hungry tonight.
2 comments:
If you get younger crickets, their wings aren't hard enough to make noise. We order ours 2 weeks old from http://www.bcrcricket.com/ and find that the whole family sleeps much better...
We might have to go back to those. I assumed that as he got older he'd need bigger crickets. He's leaving some in the cage now though, so maybe he's done growing and has reached a stasis on upping the cricket intake.
Hadn't thought about ordering online. How much is the shipping?
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