For better or worse, female tree crickets tend to prioritize two traits in their partners: loudness and size. The louder the boy cricket, the more likely a lady will be provoked by its serenade. The bigger he is when she finds him, the more time she’ll be locked up in a sexual date – up to an hour of rolling, cum-shuttling fun in some cases.
That may sound like bad news to suitors who are smaller or gentle. But a few of these males can use a clever ruse to be heard above the noise, new research shows. To stay competitive, the study found, crickets with quieter voices or small bodies will make mini megaphones out of leaves to amplify their call, persuading females to mate with them longer and more often than they otherwise would.
Rittik Deb, a biologist at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, vividly remembers the first time he observed the behavior, which was termed ‘baffling’, in 2008. Then as a graduate student, he watched in awe as a male cricket, no bigger than a grain of corn, hurried a large leaf off a pignut plant and chewed a hole in the fleshy center of it. The little lothario then slid his head and front legs through the opening, as if at a carnival photo stand-in, and began to play a surprisingly loud tune.
“We humans brag about speakers, but they evolved to make such a simple structure,” said Dr. Deb, a co-author of an article on bewilderment published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. don’t have exact words for the joy I felt. “
The baffling tree cricket was initially described by scientists in the 1970s. Since then, a few reports have looked at the ways men chew leaves in botanical speaker systems. But little was known about how or why the behavior came about, said Dr. Deb.
To determine the evolutionary origins of bewilderment, Dr. Deb and his colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where he obtained his PhD, investigated tree crickets of the species Oecanthus henryi. Baffling males, the researchers found, were usually petite than their unmic’d counterparts.
When without a leaf, smaller males chirped at about 60 decibels – comparable to noisy chatter in restaurants. But once fitted with foliage, the crickets were able to significantly amplify their serenades, “at least double or triple the volume,” said Dr. The B. The larger the blade, the more the crickets were able to express their bravado, sometimes reaching a sound pressure of around 70 decibels, around the roar of a vacuum cleaner.
In the lab, the researchers found that females were naturally attracted to louder cricket calls. The crickets even approached eagerly quiet chirping when played from higher volume speakers – the scientists’ synthetic take on stunning.
Bewilderment also seemed to increase smaller men’s chances of having longer periods of sex, making their sperm more likely to wander to their partners. While little males don’t usually mate for more than a few minutes at a time, the duration of that sexual spell can more than double when amplifying their call with leaves, the researchers found.
That may sound like the cricket version of catfishing. On the other hand, bewilderment, a form of tool use, could level the playing field for the underdogs of the tree cricket world, said Natasha Mhatre, a tree cricket expert at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who worked with the researchers on a previous study on Baffling.
With leaves on their sides, males disadvantaged by song or size could become “ just as sexy ” as their brethren, said Tamra Mendelson, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was not involved in the study.
Still, bewilderment has its limits, and many noisy or tall males don’t care about the behavior. That may be because these crickets already have more than enough females to mate with, the researchers discovered through a mathematical model.
Tree crickets are only hot to trot for a few hours each evening. Large males, who can copulate for 45 minutes straight – increasing their chances of having more offspring – could maximize their mating by monopolizing just two females per night. Smaller and quieter contenders, on the other hand, have more time to make a sound-enhancing magazine and book additional engagements.
In no time, the insects can also use other instruments. Dr. Deb remembered a diligent suitor in the lab who, with no pignut available, gnawed his way through a tissue paper and stuffed his head through the opening.
It is true that being big has its advantages. But “there are many ways to be attractive,” said Dr. Mendelson.