It's known as the cocktail-party problem: in the cacophony of sound made by insects in a spring meadow, how does one species recognize its own song? Insects such as the tree cricket solve this problem ...

Some tree crickets amplify their calls with leaves, giving them an opportunity to mate that they otherwise might miss. By Katherine J. Wu For better or for worse, female tree crickets tend to ...

The insects fashion and use "baffles"—sound controllers—made of leaves to produce sound more efficiently. Jason G. Goldman reports. That observation was in 1960. Since then the club of tool users has ...

A trio of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science has found that undersized tree crickets make up for their inability to produce loud chirps by creating baffles to increase their volume. In ...

The mid-summer lull in nature noise is about to come to an end. Crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and cicadas are about to take up their part of the annual outdoor orchestral. They’ll begin ...

When animals 'sing' sitting on the ground -- such as when crickets chirp -- their volume and reach increase dramatically, by as much as ten-fold. This result contradicts long-held beliefs in the field ...

As temperature changes, tree crickets can adjust their ears at a cellular and therefore mechanical level to match the changing frequency of each others song. It's known as the cocktail-party problem: ...