Crickets are Orthopteran insects that are related to bush crickets, and, more distantly, to grasshoppers. In older literature, such as Imms, “crickets” were placed at the family level, but contemporary authorities including Otte now place them in the superfamily Grylloidea. The word has been used in combination to describe long-recognized unrelated taxa in the suborder Ensifera, such as king crickets and mole crickets.
Some male crickets make their own megaphones by striking wing-sized holes into the center of leaves. With their bodies stuck midway through this vegetative speaker, male Oecanthus henryi crickets can more than double the volume of their calls, supporting naturally quiet males to attract as many females as loud males, researchers yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The climax of cricket mating is the transference of the spermatophore, a protein ball crammed with sperm. Females manage how much sperm they trust by how long they retain the spermatophore. With larger males, it’s about 40 minutes, compared with only 10 minutes for small males. But when Deb artificially boosted the calls of small and quiet males, females treated them like large males, retaining their spermatophores for longer.
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