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    Lecture No.17. Auditory or Acoustic Communication in Insects PDF

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    muhammad hassan
    Insects use sound communication through a variety of methods. They can produce sounds through stridulation by rubbing body parts together, vibrating membranes, or pushing air through spiracles. Insects detect sounds with tympanic membranes or mechanoreceptors in their legs. While sound is an effective communication method, it also has disadvantages for small insects like short range and high energetic costs. Many insects instead use substrate vibration to communicate.

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    Lecture No.17. Auditory or Acoustic Communication in Insects PDF

    Uploaded by

    muhammad hassan
    60 views2 pages
    Insects use sound communication through a variety of methods. They can produce sounds through stridulation by rubbing body parts together, vibrating membranes, or pushing air through spiracles. Insects detect sounds with tympanic membranes or mechanoreceptors in their legs. While sound is an effective communication method, it also has disadvantages for small insects like short range and high energetic costs. Many insects instead use substrate vibration to communicate.

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    Insects use sound communication through a variety of methods. They can produce sounds through stridulation by rubbing body parts together, vibrating membranes, or pushing air through spiracles. Insects detect sounds with tympanic membranes or mechanoreceptors in their legs. While sound is an effective communication method, it also has disadvantages for small insects like short range and high energetic costs. Many insects instead use substrate vibration to communicate.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    60 views2 pages

    Lecture No.17. Auditory or Acoustic Communication in Insects PDF

    Uploaded by

    muhammad hassan
    Insects use sound communication through a variety of methods. They can produce sounds through stridulation by rubbing body parts together, vibrating membranes, or pushing air through spiracles. Insects detect sounds with tympanic membranes or mechanoreceptors in their legs. While sound is an effective communication method, it also has disadvantages for small insects like short range and high energetic costs. Many insects instead use substrate vibration to communicate.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    Auditory or Acoustic Communication in Insects

    Sound is produced when a physical object vibrates rapidly, disturbs nearby air molecules (or other surrounding
    medium), and generates compression waves that travel in all directions away from the source. We perceive
    these waves as sound when they collide with our ear drum and cause a mechanical disturbance that is detected
    by sensory neurons in our inner ear. Both living and non-living objects produce sound, but only animals use
    it as a means of communication.
    Sound serves as a very effective communication modality. It can be made to vary in frequency (high pitch
    vs. low pitch), amplitude (loudness), and periodicity (the temporal pattern of freqency and
    amplitude). Together, these three variables can create an extremely wide and complex range of signals -- from
    an insect's mating call to human speech and vocal music. Since sound waves move rapidly through air (about
    331 m/sec), acoustic signals can be quickly started, stopped, or modified to send a time-sensitive message.
    At best, the human ear can detect sound
    frequencies only within the range of Pros and Cons of Acoustic Communication
    about 20-20,000 hertz (vibrations per
    second). But some insects (as well as
    Advantages:
    other animals like bats and dolphins)
    produce and detect sounds that are well  Not limited by environmental barriers
    above this frequency range. Some
     Effective over distances and around corners
    grasshoppers and moths, for example,
    produce ultrasonic sounds as high as  Highly variable, fast change -- high information
    80,000 hertz. Entomologists study these content
    high-pitch sounds by using an audio
    transducer, an electronic device that Disadvantages:
    converts inaudible high frequencies to  May reveal location of sender to a potential predator
    lower audible frequencies.
     Less effective in "noisy" environments (e.g. seashore)
    Most insects detect sound with
    a tympanic membrane in the abdomen  May be metabolically "expensive" to produce
    (e.g. grasshoppers and moths) or in the  Attenuation -- intensity falls rapidly with distance
    tibiae of the front legs (e.g. crickets and from source (cube-root function)
    katydids). Mosquitoes have antennal
    hairs that resonate to certain frequencies
    of sound. But sound vibrations can also
    travel through solid objects, and some insects (e.g. some species of ants, bees, termites, and treehoppers) can
    sense substrate vibrations with mechanoreceptors (chordotonal organs) in their legs. Since these signals are
    "felt" rather than "heard", they are usually regarded as a form of tactile communication.
    From the buzzing of a bee to the whine of a mosquito to a cricket's chirp, insects can make lots of sounds.
    Many times, these sounds are higher than human ears can hear. Insects can hear them with sensitive
    membranes called tymbals located on their abdomen or legs. Here are a few of the ways that insects make
    their own sounds (most of these humans can hear):
     Bugs like crickets and grasshoppers make sound by rubbing one part of the body (like a leg) against
    another (maybe a wing). This is called stridulation. You can think of it as kind of like playing a violin.
     Some insects, including cicadas, can make a very loud sound by vibrating a membrane on their body
    (their tymbal). A hollow part of their body cavity acts as a resonance chamber to amplify the sound.
    This works like a drum.
     Most insects breathe through tiny pores called spiracles. Some of them use these spiracles to make
    sounds, too. The Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, for example, pushes air out of its spiracles very fast
    to make a hissing sound.
     Bees and mosquitoes buzz when they fly because their wings vibrate fast enough to produce a sound.
     Death watch beetle produce sounds by knocking or tapping with their body parts.
    Striking the tip of their abdomens against a tree branch, nomadic sawfly larvae make soft tapping noises that
    summon lone individuals back into the aggregation. The male waterboatman, Palmacorixa nana, strokes his
    peg-laden forelegs across a female’s serrated mouthparts during mating, and she responds to the sound by
    remaining motionless during copulation.
    If audible sound is such a good way to communicate, why don’t more insects use this method? One set of
    reasons has its roots in insects’ relatively small size. First, for mechanical reasons small size generally results
    in the production of relatively high-frequency signals. These weaken and degrade more quickly than low-
    frequency signals, and this limits communication range. To get around this problem, some small insects
    increase their broadcast range by behavioral tactics such as using plants as acoustic baffles, calling from
    elevated positions, or calling from within burrows that act like horns; others have structural modifications that
    allow them to produce sounds at lower frequencies than others of comparable size.
    Second, sound production may be energetically more costly and inefficient for a small invertebrate organism.
    The density and elasticity of insect cuticle differs significantly from that of air, so it takes a great deal of effort
    to convert the muscular energy controlling a vibrating structure into airborne sound. Thus, it probably should
    not come as a surprise to find that many insects have taken the route of producing vibrations in the substrate
    instead. The energetic costs of tapping on a surface are much lower than the costs of calling through the air.
    Tubular structures such as leaves and stems allow information to be transmitted as bending waves, which can
    travel efficiently for some distance.
    Quiz
    1. How the sound is produced and perceived?
    2. What is the range in which human perceive sounds and what is the range in which insects perceive the
    sounds? What is usually done by human to perceive the inaudible sounds?
    3. What are the different ways of sound production in insects? Explain all in details.
    4. What are the different advantages and disadvantages of sound or auditory or acoustic communication in
    insects?
    5. If audible sound is such a good way to communicate, why don’t more insects use this method?
    6. What are the different elements of sounds and what is their role in sound qualities?

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