Field Notes: Crickets (Patreon)

Male field crickets have a different song for every occasion: to advertise their fitness, woo a mate or keep their rivals away. So how do they make all these different chirps?

For his upcoming Deep Look episode, Josh Cassidy, our lead producer and cinematographer, spent an afternoon filming variable field crickets under a microscope at UC Berkeley’s Biological Imaging Facility to help answer this question.

It's easier to film our subjects up close in controlled settings, so Josh used these aquarium tanks to help him capture the different types of chirping behaviors – like a male cricket sounding its rivalry call to fend off another male.

Crickets don’t chirp on command, so fellow producer Mike Seely played some prerecorded cricket sounds in the hopes they'd sing for the camera. (It eventually worked!)