Cricket courtship crisis as traffic noise drowns out mating song

Cricket courtship crisis as traffic noise drowns out mating song

Metro.co.uk - Tech·2021-02-03 07:00

A female cricket mounting a male (Credits: PA)

Traffic noise distracts female crickets from listening to the courtship song of the opposite sex and could lead to them selecting a lower quality male to mate with, research suggests.

This disruption may cause a decline in population viability, according to the study by Anglia Ruskin University.

Male crickets perform a courtship song by rubbing their wings together when a female cricket is nearby.

It takes the males a lot of energy to perform their song, which gives information about its qualities which is taken into account by females when they decide who to mate with.

Researchers paired female crickets with silenced male crickets and played them artificial courtship songs, of different qualities, when the males tried to sing.

They did this with a variety of background noise conditions present.

In ambient noise, used as a control, the female crickets mounted the males much sooner and more frequently when paired with a high-quality courtship song.

With traffic noise as a distraction, a high-quality courtship song provided no benefit to the male crickets.

Traffic travels along the M6 motorway outside Wigan (Credits: EPA)

Researchers observed that courtship duration and mounting frequency were not influenced by the quality, or even the presence, of a male’s song when there was more background sound, including when white noise was played.

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