Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail.
Speaker 2: My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host, Robert
Speaker 2: Lamb is out today, so I'm going to be recording
Speaker 2: this episode by myself, but Rob will be back with
Speaker 2: me later this week. Right now, the plan for the
Speaker 2: week is that I'm going to do listener mail solo today. Tomorrow,
Speaker 2: which will be Tuesday, June eighteenth, is going to be
Speaker 2: the last episode in our series of Vault episodes on Dreams.
Speaker 2: Wednesday of this week will be a Monster Fact omnibus,
Speaker 2: and then, hopefully, if we're able to get ready in time,
Speaker 2: we should have a new core episode of Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind for you on Thursday. If not, it'll
Speaker 2: be another Vault and then we'll be with you for
Speaker 2: Weird House on Friday. But either way, we should be
Speaker 2: back with new content for you later this week. Okay,
Speaker 2: I guess let's jump right into messages. We got a
Speaker 2: bunch of great responses to our series on Cicadas. I'm
Speaker 2: going to start with this message from Jim. I made
Speaker 2: some edits for clarity when read aloud, I hope I
Speaker 2: did everything here Justice Jim. Jim says, Hey, guys, hope you,
Speaker 2: your families and your team had a nice break. When
Speaker 2: I saw the title of this episode, I was excited
Speaker 2: to hear that you were going to do a two
Speaker 2: part episode on cicadas. The insect world is one of
Speaker 2: my passions. By the way, great episode. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: Here in Canberra, Australia's capital city, we too experience every
Speaker 2: couple of years a massive emergence of cicadas in some reserves.
Speaker 2: If you don't have earmuffs on, it's impossible to work
Speaker 2: or walk through the reserve. Is The noise that comes
Speaker 2: from the cicadas is deafening. But halfway through the first episode,
Speaker 2: I had a flashback of my childchildhood and I wanted
Speaker 2: to share a memory from when I was about six
Speaker 2: or seven years old, some forty years ago. I was
Speaker 2: raised in Orange, a city in central New South Wales,
Speaker 2: about twenty kilometers outside of Orange. There is a picnic
Speaker 2: reserve in the middle of a pine plantation on a
Speaker 2: creek called four Mile Creek. As kids, we would go
Speaker 2: out there with the church group and on the way
Speaker 2: out to four Mile Creek you would also go past
Speaker 2: the agricultural department. I don't remember the environment that day
Speaker 2: or the noise, but it must have been one of
Speaker 2: those years when we had three species emerging. The most
Speaker 2: common cicadas were the black ones, then the green ones
Speaker 2: and the tiger ones, which were rare to come across. Now,
Speaker 2: someone I think it was older teenagers of the church,
Speaker 2: told my two older brothers and me that the tiger
Speaker 2: cicada you could sell to the agricultural department for ten cents.
Speaker 2: Ten cents in the eighties, that was a lot of
Speaker 2: money for a kid. I don't remember collecting the higer
Speaker 2: cicadas until we came across the white ones. We called
Speaker 2: them ghosts and were told that they were worth five
Speaker 2: dollars each, so believing them, I guess the older kids.
Speaker 2: Believing the older kids, we started to collect the cicadas
Speaker 2: emerging out of their shells, and they were all white ones.
Speaker 2: We collected a very large number of them. Through all
Speaker 2: these cicadas, still in their exoskeleton or half emerged into
Speaker 2: the back of our father's Kingswood station wagon. Thinking we
Speaker 2: made a fortune, we ran off to play and have lunch.
Speaker 2: Some time passed and we were called time to go home.
Speaker 2: Running back to the car, we found our very upset
Speaker 2: father with the front door open. He was not happy.
Speaker 2: Cicadas were flying out of the car door he had opened.
Speaker 2: Inside the front of the car, there were lots of
Speaker 2: black and green cicadas flying around the back of the
Speaker 2: station wagon, and the back seat had a lot of
Speaker 2: empty exoskeletons just sitting there. What a scene it was
Speaker 2: with a very upset down who made us remove all
Speaker 2: the live cicadas and all of the exoskeletons from the car.
Speaker 2: But we were distressed too. Where were all of our
Speaker 2: ghost cicadas? Our fortune all gone? I paused the episode
Speaker 2: and had a bit of a laugh. We didn't know
Speaker 2: then that when insects emerge out of their exoskeletons, they
Speaker 2: are molting, and newly emerged insects are often ghostly in color,
Speaker 2: having reduced or absent pigment. Thanks guys made my day.
Speaker 2: And then finally, Jim has some notes about the probable
Speaker 2: species identification of the Australian cicadas from his story, so
Speaker 2: he says, FYI, the black and most common cicadas are
Speaker 2: called the red eye cicada or saltota morins the green
Speaker 2: cicadas are called green grosser cicadas. These are Cyclochila australacea
Speaker 2: and I looked these up. According to the Australian Museum's
Speaker 2: info page, they have like different color variants of the
Speaker 2: species that are called You've got the greengrocer, but then
Speaker 2: you get the yellow Monday, chocolate Soldier, and blue moon. Interesting.
Speaker 2: And then Jim comes back and says, what we called
Speaker 2: the tiger cicadas were actually called double drummers or sofa cicata.
Speaker 2: All the best for now and keep up the great work,
Speaker 2: looking forward to the next episode. Jim. Well, thank you
Speaker 2: so much. Jim. You know this really got me thinking
Speaker 2: not so much about insect biology, but about child psychology
Speaker 2: and the difference between work and play with your story
Speaker 2: about trying to collect all of the valuable cicadas for
Speaker 2: the Agricultural department. So this story is kind of an
Speaker 2: example of a genre of childhood experiences that I remember
Speaker 2: from that age. Also that those experiences where you think
Speaker 2: you have discovered a way to make lots of money
Speaker 2: based on one or more mistaken or implausible premises. And
Speaker 2: I remember these these schemes they often centered around to
Speaker 2: gathering task like yours did, Like I remember deciding that
Speaker 2: a certain kind of sparkly rock was actually a valuable
Speaker 2: gym that you could sell, and I would like go
Speaker 2: around digging them up and collecting them in a backpack.
Speaker 2: There's an interesting thing about these like kid conceived cash
Speaker 2: cow schemes, which is that the way I remember them,
Speaker 2: in most cases, you're able to really believe in them
Speaker 2: in the early stages, like it doesn't feel like you're
Speaker 2: just playing pretend. You really think you're going to get
Speaker 2: the money. But then at some point later on in
Speaker 2: the scheme, it starts to feel less real and you
Speaker 2: don't keep pushing forward as if you believe in it.
Speaker 2: So Jim, in your story, if you hadn't gotten in
Speaker 2: trouble with your dad and had to release all the bugs,
Speaker 2: would you have actually insisted that your parents stop at
Speaker 2: the agricultural department on the way home so you could
Speaker 2: collect the bounties. I don't know in your particular case,
Speaker 2: but my memory of these types of schemes is that
Speaker 2: by that point later in the day, like the magic
Speaker 2: of the idea probably would have worn off, And if
Speaker 2: I'd been in a similar situation, I probably would stop
Speaker 2: caring or believing that it was possible to get the
Speaker 2: money by the time I was heading home. But what
Speaker 2: causes that change? Why did I believe the rocks were
Speaker 2: valuable gyms in the first place, and what changed my
Speaker 2: mind about it by the passage of a few hours.
Speaker 2: I don't know anyway. Now that I've got a toddler,
Speaker 2: I think about this kind of stuff a lot, and
Speaker 2: it's interesting and kind of mysterious to remember those states
Speaker 2: of mind that you could get into as a child,
Speaker 2: where you're like fully engaged in a task. It's taking
Speaker 2: all of your effort and attention, but it's actually not
Speaker 2: clear to you whether you're doing serious, goal directed work
Speaker 2: or just playing a game. But either way, thank you,
Speaker 2: Jim Okay. This next message comes to us from Sierra.
Speaker 2: It is about our Vault episodes on the Moons of Uranus.
Speaker 2: Cer says, hello, longtime listener and big fan here. I'm
Speaker 2: loving the episodes about the moons of Uranus, especially the
Speaker 2: discussion of its proper pronunciation at the top of the show.
Speaker 2: It made me want to share a mental image that
Speaker 2: was conjured years ago and linger still. In some astrology
Speaker 2: book I read once, Uranus was referred to as a
Speaker 2: planet that rules rebellion, flippancy, revolution, perhaps due to its
Speaker 2: odd rotation, Oh yeah, sideways rotation. Cira says it made
Speaker 2: me picture Uranus as the iggy pop slash sid Vicious
Speaker 2: of the planets, proudly rocking his name with green hair
Speaker 2: and double birds to the audience laughing emoji. I hope
Speaker 2: you can enjoy that thought too. Thanks for sharing the
Speaker 2: good humor, wit and wisdom over the years, Sincerely, Sierra,
Speaker 2: Thank you, Sierra. All right, this next message comes from Chelsea.
Speaker 2: This is another response to our series on cicadas, and
Speaker 2: specifically this is about the etymological digression we took in
Speaker 2: the episode looking into the history of the word bug,
Speaker 2: which in its earliest use is in English referred to
Speaker 2: a scarecrow. This is in an early English translation of
Speaker 2: the Bible, or actually to a sort of deuterocanonical book
Speaker 2: associated with the Bible. But so there's a scarecrow, or
Speaker 2: it also referred to a hobgoblin like creature, a monster
Speaker 2: of some kind, and then only later came to refer
Speaker 2: to actual biological insects, and then later still came to
Speaker 2: have this connotation of general problems like computer bugs and
Speaker 2: so forth. Chelsea says, hi, guys. Fact, the use of
Speaker 2: the word bug to describe a computer bug dates from
Speaker 2: nineteen forty seven, when the Harvard computer science team found
Speaker 2: a moth trapped inside the Mark two, which was messing
Speaker 2: with the electronics. Early computer programming language. Pioneer Grace Hopper
Speaker 2: was a member of the team. So computer bugs are
Speaker 2: named for the creepy crawleys. Keep up the awesome work, Chelsea.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Chelsea. Well, so I did some looking into
Speaker 2: this story, and one thing I came across is you
Speaker 2: can actually look this up. There is a picture of
Speaker 2: it on the National Museum of American History website. There
Speaker 2: was a log book that was used by the computer
Speaker 2: science team at Harvard while people were working on the
Speaker 2: Mark to computer, and they actually physically taped the moth
Speaker 2: found inside the computer into the logbook, so it's taped
Speaker 2: there on the paper. You can see images of this,
Speaker 2: and then they write underneath it first actual case of
Speaker 2: a bug being found. I was also reading some articles
Speaker 2: about this historical incident, and apparently there are some common
Speaker 2: misconceptions about it, Like, Chelsea, you certainly did not say this,
Speaker 2: but a lot of people say that this was Grace
Speaker 2: Hopper's personal log book, and from what I've read, that
Speaker 2: seems to be not true, that it doesn't look like
Speaker 2: her handwriting, and it's probably just said that because she's
Speaker 2: a famous person who was there at the time working
Speaker 2: with this kind of working with this technology. Another misconception
Speaker 2: I've seen written about this was that this was the
Speaker 2: first ever use of the word bug in a sort
Speaker 2: of technical engineering context, which is certainly not the case.
Speaker 2: There are instances of this going way back back to
Speaker 2: Thomas Edison wrote about bugs in some of his inventions
Speaker 2: and so forth. But it does appear that Grace Hopper
Speaker 2: was a very enthusiastic early user of the term bug
Speaker 2: in a specifically in a compute context. So it is
Speaker 2: it's not the case that this was the first use
Speaker 2: of bugs in engineering or in technology, as some people
Speaker 2: have said. But I was reading about this misconception in
Speaker 2: an interesting article for the for the I Tripole Annals
Speaker 2: of the History of Computing. There was an article in
Speaker 2: that journal by an author named Peggy Aldrich Kidwell, a
Speaker 2: historian of science and technology. I just want to read
Speaker 2: a paragraph from her paper. Kidwell writes, quote in summary,
Speaker 2: the phrase computer bug has served several functions. Talking about
Speaker 2: bugs rather than flaws appeals to the wit of programmers
Speaker 2: and computer users. In the early days of computing, the
Speaker 2: phrase was used primarily by a relatively small group of
Speaker 2: experts marking their special status. At the same time, having
Speaker 2: a short, general term that covers a wide variety of
Speaker 2: flaws has been useful, particularly because the exact source of
Speaker 2: the error was often unknown. Calling such problems bugs rather
Speaker 2: than failures suggests that they are small faults that can
Speaker 2: be corrected, not a general in thinking, and not a
Speaker 2: general failure in thinking or design. This usage had long
Speaker 2: been a refuge of US inventors and served the optimistic
Speaker 2: nature of computer designers and programmers. So I think that's
Speaker 2: kind of an interesting point about the psychology of engineering,
Speaker 2: or the psychology of invention and technical work, that even
Speaker 2: the language you select to describe the problems you face
Speaker 2: in your work can color your emotions in how in
Speaker 2: how you have to go about addressing it, and that
Speaker 2: by using cute little terms like bug, which implied that
Speaker 2: the problem is external, implied that the problem is small,
Speaker 2: implied that the problem is you know, it's not something
Speaker 2: that is wrong with the general approach or design of
Speaker 2: the system. But it's just like a little little thing
Speaker 2: that got in there and went wrong. Kind of helps
Speaker 2: you maintain a positive attitude in addressing problems and fixing them.
Speaker 2: So anyway, thank you so much, Chelsea. All right. This
Speaker 2: last message is also in response to cicadas. This is
Speaker 2: one that sent me down a bit of a research trail.
Speaker 2: So this comes from Jeremy. Jeremy says, hello, Robert and Joe,
Speaker 2: with reference to the recent rise of the cicadas episode
Speaker 2: and the volume of their mating call. We thankfully don't
Speaker 2: get cicadas in Europe, but we do have a contender
Speaker 2: for the loudest insect and winner in the volume generated
Speaker 2: in proportion to size category, the lesser water boatman or
Speaker 2: micro necta. This is spelled scholt Zi. I don't know
Speaker 2: if that's sculptz or schultzy. I'm gonna say schultze. The
Speaker 2: micronecta Schultze is only zero points zero seven inches or
Speaker 2: two millimeters long, yet can generate ninety nine point five decibels,
Speaker 2: with peaks up to one hundred and five decibels. And
Speaker 2: although this sound is created underwater, it can be heard
Speaker 2: on the banks of the streams, rivers, and lakes where
Speaker 2: it lives. Now, that in itself is amazing, and I
Speaker 2: want to go into some more detail about that in
Speaker 2: just a minute, but I've got a note on what
Speaker 2: Jeremy is about to say in the email some context
Speaker 2: to remind listeners. In the first Decade episode, we talked
Speaker 2: about how insects like crickets and grasshoppers make sounds mostly
Speaker 2: through a process called stridulation, which means rubbing, rubbing one
Speaker 2: part of the body against another. So, for example, mail
Speaker 2: crickets rub the edges of their four wings together their
Speaker 2: front pair of wings. They rub those together using what's
Speaker 2: called a file and scraper system. So basically, one wings
Speaker 2: surface is like a stick and the other has a
Speaker 2: series of ridges like the teeth of a comb, and
Speaker 2: rubbing them together against one another produces a scraping sound.
Speaker 2: Male cicadas, on the other hand, do not use strigulation.
Speaker 2: They have dedicated sound producing organs called timbals, which are
Speaker 2: these corrugated kiteness membranes kind of like drumheads, connected to
Speaker 2: muscles and rib like structures underneath, and these are on
Speaker 2: either side of the body under the wings, and the
Speaker 2: cicadas make their sound by rapidly flexing and buckling these
Speaker 2: organs and then allowing them to snap back into place anyway.
Speaker 2: With that context back to Jeremy's message, Jeremy rites, in
Speaker 2: contrast to the leg, wing or rib based sound generation
Speaker 2: methods used by insects like cicadas, the lesser water boatmen
Speaker 2: stridulates its penis against the ridged surface of its abdomen
Speaker 2: to create the sound. And then Jeremy and some references
Speaker 2: and also a paper, and he summarizes the paper by saying, quote,
Speaker 2: it is theorized that a trapped bubble of air is
Speaker 2: used to amplify the volume. Best regards Jeremy. Well, thank
Speaker 2: you Jeremy for writing in and bringing up this amazingly
Speaker 2: interesting animal. Now a couple of things to address at
Speaker 2: the top here, I had to mention something from the
Speaker 2: earlier part of your message about not having cicadas in Europe.
Speaker 2: I double check to be sure, but there definitely are
Speaker 2: cicadas in Europe. For example, multiple species in the genus Cicadeta,
Speaker 2: like Cicadeta montana that's also known as the new forest
Speaker 2: cicada is just one of the species found in Europe.
Speaker 2: It's in England in places throughout continental Europe. But from
Speaker 2: what I've been able to dig up, all of the
Speaker 2: species of cicadas found anywhere in Europe are annuals, the
Speaker 2: kind that emerge every year, as opposed to the kinds
Speaker 2: we have in North America with broods on those thirteen
Speaker 2: and seventeen year cycles. But also, I love your note
Speaker 2: bringing attention to the lesser water boatmen, and it's incredibly loud,
Speaker 2: stridulating penis. I had to know more, so I did
Speaker 2: some investigation on this insect. So again, as Jeremy says,
Speaker 2: the species is Micronecta schultzy. Like cicadas. The lesser water
Speaker 2: boatmen are of the order Hymiptera, so they are also
Speaker 2: the true bugs. Remember that's what the hymipterns are, the
Speaker 2: true bugs, with the most distinctive body features being they're
Speaker 2: piercing and sucking mouthparts. So hymipterans usually have a sort
Speaker 2: of hinged needle called a rostrum on their mouth which
Speaker 2: they used to puncture a food substrate which could be
Speaker 2: a plant or an animal and suck nutrients out. In
Speaker 2: the case of water boatmen, it seems they generally they're
Speaker 2: not predatory. They generally suck nutrients from algae. So I
Speaker 2: looked up the original paper that reported this stridulation miracle
Speaker 2: and it goes back to the year twenty eleven. So
Speaker 2: the paper is by Rome Sewer, David Mackie and James F. C. Windmill,
Speaker 2: published in Plus one in twenty eleven, and the paper
Speaker 2: is called so Small, So Loud extremely high sound pressure
Speaker 2: level from a pigmy aquatic insect carrixiity micronectiny. So the
Speaker 2: authors here begin with some context for their research and
Speaker 2: noting some common difficulties in sound based communication among animals.
Speaker 2: Sound producing animals often want to reach as many receivers
Speaker 2: as possible with their sounds, and they also want their
Speaker 2: sounds to contain as much information as possible. In order
Speaker 2: to reach more receivers, a very simple strategy is make
Speaker 2: your signal louder. But making a louder signal comes with
Speaker 2: some difficulties. One problem, in the words of the authors
Speaker 2: is that quote when considering acoustic communication, the production of
Speaker 2: a loud and intelligible signal is not an easy task.
Speaker 2: Even for human built sound systems. The system can be overdriven,
Speaker 2: distorting time and frequency parameters and consequently impairing information transfer.
Speaker 2: So in other words, selecting for loudness can harm the
Speaker 2: clarity of the information being transferred, and you can think
Speaker 2: about this like you know, turning a speaker up until
Speaker 2: it gets distorted and it's hard to understand what's being said.
Speaker 2: Another problem is that how loud you can get is
Speaker 2: usually constrained by what the authors call morphological characteristics, the
Speaker 2: size and the shape of your body and sound producing organs.
Speaker 2: In short, a small object usually cannot produce a very
Speaker 2: loud sound, and this is why if you look at
Speaker 2: lists of the loudest animals, most of them are also
Speaker 2: the largest animals, so you get like whales and elephants
Speaker 2: as the largest animals. However, there's another way you can
Speaker 2: look at sound production, which is not just purely what
Speaker 2: is the loudest sound achievable, but what is the ratio
Speaker 2: of sound production to body size. Animals are able to
Speaker 2: produce the loudest sounds with the smallest bodies and the
Speaker 2: smallest sound producing organs. So here the authors turn to
Speaker 2: freshwater insects, many of which can communicate by sound. Since
Speaker 2: sound is a useful way of transmitting information when visibility.
Speaker 2: Visual visibility is low, such as in murky water Micronecta
Speaker 2: schultzi is an example of an insect that uses sound
Speaker 2: based communication for pair formation in mating, for males and
Speaker 2: females to find one another, for males to attract females,
Speaker 2: and to attract females to initiate mating. It's possibly also
Speaker 2: used for male male competition competition between males for access
Speaker 2: to mating. The authors of this paper collected specimens of
Speaker 2: this insect from a river and from a pond, both
Speaker 2: located near Paris in France, and measure their sound production
Speaker 2: in controlled conditions. Apparently a lot of the research here
Speaker 2: was just aimed at making sure they were getting accurate
Speaker 2: readings about the sound production, and so, just as Jeremy
Speaker 2: said in the email, the authors did indeed find that
Speaker 2: these tiny insects were able to create shockingly powerful sounds
Speaker 2: for their size. When measured at a distance of one meter,
Speaker 2: the intensity of the sound was roughly a seventy nine
Speaker 2: decibel sound pressure level, with peaks of ninety nine to
Speaker 2: one hundred decibels. A BBC report writing this up compared
Speaker 2: this to the approximate loudness of sitting in the front
Speaker 2: row listening to a loud symphony orchestra, except that's kind
Speaker 2: of hard to make as a comparison in your mind,
Speaker 2: because the symphony orchestra is a large like composite system
Speaker 2: with many different sound production points. I guess the case
Speaker 2: here would be like you're listening to an orchestra that
Speaker 2: is a hair sized sexual organ of a two millimeter
Speaker 2: insect about a meter away from your head. The author
Speaker 2: is right that while this is by no means the
Speaker 2: loudest in the animal kingdom quote, when scaled to body
Speaker 2: length and compared to two hundred and twenty seven other
Speaker 2: acoustic species, the acoustic energy produced by Imschultzi appears as
Speaker 2: an extreme value, outperforming marine and terrestrial mammal vocalizations. So,
Speaker 2: according to these calculations, it is the loudest animal relative
Speaker 2: to its body size. So, as the title of the
Speaker 2: paper says, so small, so loud, if that's true, I
Speaker 2: was wondering why don't we notice hearing them more often?
Speaker 2: Like why do even if you know you don't necessarily
Speaker 2: have these around where you live. Why don't you read
Speaker 2: things of people just commonly talking about the sounds they make,
Speaker 2: the way people talk about the sounds made by cicadas.
Speaker 2: I think the answer is probably because they make these
Speaker 2: sounds underwater and people are usually above water, and from
Speaker 2: what I was reading, about ninety nine percent of the
Speaker 2: intensity of the sound is lost when it crosses the
Speaker 2: air water inner though, though that doesn't mean you can't
Speaker 2: hear it again. People on the banks of waterways where
Speaker 2: these animals live are still sometimes able to hear them,
Speaker 2: which is just a pretty incredible thing in itself, given
Speaker 2: how much reduction in the sound there is from crossing
Speaker 2: up out of the water into the air above. So
Speaker 2: it just indicates how loud the original sound is that
Speaker 2: people ever hear it at all. Couple more questions, how
Speaker 2: exactly does this animal make the sound? In one sense
Speaker 2: the authors know the answer, and in another sense they
Speaker 2: said they did not. So the known part is that,
Speaker 2: as mentioned in Jeremy's email, the male water boatman rubs
Speaker 2: a sexual organ against a part of its abdomen to
Speaker 2: generate the sound. This organ is in many articles about
Speaker 2: this called a penis, but the paper clarifies it is
Speaker 2: actually the male's right side peramere rubbing against a lobe
Speaker 2: on the eighth abdominal segment. Perameres seem somewhat equivalent to
Speaker 2: a penis. They are paired sexual organs on either side
Speaker 2: of the abdomen. The paper calls them genitalia appendages, which
Speaker 2: I was reading about it seems like they often serve
Speaker 2: as clasping devices during copulation. The unknown part, according to
Speaker 2: the authors of this paper in twenty eleven, and people
Speaker 2: have commented since then, was how exactly this genital sound
Speaker 2: emission system, which they point out is no larger than
Speaker 2: fifty micrometers, which is again about the width of a
Speaker 2: human hair on the small side of the range of
Speaker 2: a width of a human hair. How that was capable
Speaker 2: of producing such a loud sound. I'll come back to
Speaker 2: that in a second. Another question is why is the
Speaker 2: sound so loud in an evolutionary sense. According to this
Speaker 2: twenty eleven paper, a possible answer is sexual selection unconstrained
Speaker 2: by predation risk. So the males of this insects species
Speaker 2: make the sound to attract females and possibly compete with
Speaker 2: and drown out other males. So if louder sounds lead
Speaker 2: to more chances to mate, evolution will keep selecting for them. Now,
Speaker 2: a normal expected limiting principle on the loudness of that
Speaker 2: sound would be that it would also attract predators and parasitoids,
Speaker 2: so you know eventually you're going to be putting out
Speaker 2: your ringing a dinner bell when you're making that sound
Speaker 2: saying come eat me. But the authors say, we don't
Speaker 2: know that much about what predators and parasitoids are associated
Speaker 2: with these water insects, and as possible, water boatmen just
Speaker 2: don't have many natural aquatic predators or parasitoids, and thus
Speaker 2: there is little external limitation on the selection for loudness
Speaker 2: of the scraping penis or paramere. But the authors say
Speaker 2: that basically not enough is known about the associated predator guild,
Speaker 2: so this should be something study you know, needs further study. Now,
Speaker 2: coming back to the question of how mechanically these insects
Speaker 2: make such a loud sound, This has been looked at
Speaker 2: in subsequent research. Some other insects that produce underwater mating calls,
Speaker 2: such as carrixidy and microonectiny, have a strategy of resonating
Speaker 2: their stridulation. So they like rub something underwater and then
Speaker 2: they resonate it through a trapped air bubble that they
Speaker 2: carry with them when they dive to breathe from. I
Speaker 2: believe so a study by read at All from twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: which was linked by Jeremy in his original email, creates
Speaker 2: a model suggesting that Schultze does the same thing resonates
Speaker 2: through an air bubble, but with some efficiency improvements. And
Speaker 2: I admit I tried my best to understand this paper,
Speaker 2: but I was not able to decipher all of the
Speaker 2: technical stuff about acoustics in play. I believe if I'm
Speaker 2: understanding it right, I believe their claim is that the
Speaker 2: specific orientation, size, and distance between the insects sound producing
Speaker 2: surface and its air bubble resonator create what they call
Speaker 2: a high coupling efficiency, allowing for a huge gain and power.
Speaker 2: So according to these authors, it seems to be something
Speaker 2: about the sort of the distance between and relationship and
Speaker 2: physical relationship between the air bubble and the striated surface.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I'm not sure I follow all the technical
Speaker 2: details on that, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating animal.
Speaker 2: It is amazing to think about how such a tiny
Speaker 2: creature can produce such loud sounds. And yeah, if you're interested,
Speaker 2: you want to read more, you go look it up
Speaker 2: Micronecta Schultzi, And thank you Jeremy for writing about this.
Speaker 2: We love to get emails like this, emails that build
Speaker 2: on our episodes with sort of related but new trails
Speaker 2: to run down. Okay, I think that does it for today.
Speaker 2: If you are new to the show, Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind is primarily a sign night's podcast with core
Speaker 2: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do listener mail like
Speaker 2: this episode on Mondays, a short form episode on Wednesdays,
Speaker 2: and on Fridays we do a sort of subspecies show
Speaker 2: called Weird House Cinema, where my co host Rob Lamb
Speaker 2: and I watch and discuss weird movies. They can be
Speaker 2: good or bad, big or small, well known or obscure,
Speaker 2: as long as they are weird. To remind you all
Speaker 2: about the rest of this week, we're going to be
Speaker 2: back tomorrow with a vault episode, Wednesday with an omnibus,
Speaker 2: and hopefully Thursday we will have a brand new core
Speaker 2: episode for you. If not, we'll have another vault episode
Speaker 2: then and we'll have Weird House Cinema for you on Friday.
Speaker 2: But we're shooting to get you that brand new core
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Speaker 2: thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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