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STOP, What's That Sound?

Summer is a season of magical moments, from the fervor of birds nesting, snakes feeding and breeding, toads and frogs calling, woodcocks flocking, mammals grazing, to a myriad of insects beginning and ending their life cycles.

Sit on your porch in the evening, or better yet on the roof of your porch, and listen. Male cicadas of the family Cicadidae, order Homoptera (true bugs), will fill the air with their mating buzzes as the sound crescendos to a finale and day gives way to night.

As dark continues to settle, fireflies will begin glimmering through the fields, the yards, the woodlots, and the stream margins in every neighborhood.

"Here come the real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies
That, though they never equal stars in size
(And they were never really stars at heart),
Achieve at times a very starlike start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part."
-Robert Frost, "Fireflies in the Garden"

Fireflies belong to the family Lampyridae in the order Coleoptera (beetles). Fireflies are predaceous as both larva and adults. Most famous for their ability to produce "cold light" (bioluminescence) at the tips of their abdomens, males crisscross an area flashing rhythmically in search of the appropriate female's response flash from the ground or bush. Males of different species have different flash frequencies, colors, durations, and pauses between signals. Most critical in the female response is her delay in answering the male's flash. Her delay varies among species from three to nine seconds.

Seems simple enough, but do not be fooled. Females of the genus Photuris, after mating, will turn into mimicing, ambushing predators of male Photinus spp. A female of Photuris mimics a female of Photinus, then waits for a free, delivered meal (in the form of a male Photinus), increasing the mimicing female's fecundity. We can't stop here, however, for there is more to tell. Male Photinus macdermotti mimic the mimicing female Photuris when they are mating with a female macdermotti (female Photuris sometimes insert an extra flash by mistake that signals males macdermotti of the danger). Mimicing the female mimicing the female then allows a male macdermotti a sexual monopoly of his female mate.

We have been on our roof top so long it's now August. As cicadas stop, katydids take over. Close your eyes and try to focus in on the symphony of music you hear around you, pulsing katy-did, KatyDid, KATY-Did-DID. Katydids, called long-horned grasshoppers, make rasping calls by rubbing their wings together with the underside of the left wing, "the file," rubbing against the hardened "scraper" of the right wing. Unlike many insects, both males and females call to locate each other. The volume of the display is intensified by the synchronization of all their calls. But if you use your Herculean concentration you can always hear a few that just can't keep the beat.

As summer progresses, stop, look and listen, always remembering that memorable experiences in viewing wildlife come from being an enthusiastic observer, not necessarily from traveling to distant wild places.