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Counting cricket chirps is a very accurate way of determining the temperature in Spain
The chirping of crickets is surely one of the sounds most synonymous with summer, calling to mind balmy evenings spent outdoors. But aside from being the perfect summer soundtrack, these interesting insects can also help us gauge the temperature quite accurately.
At night, crickets lift and rub the edges of their wings together, emitting the characteristic chirp that is designed to mark their territory and attract females.
It’s only the male of the species that sings, but to do so he must warm up his body by sitting in the sun until he reaches the optimum temperature. In this sense, crickets actually need heat to stay active and if it becomes too cool they simply go into a kind of torpor until its warms up again.
The summer months coincide with mating season, and when it’s a sultry day, the chirrup of the male cricket will sound quite vigorous and energetic, when it’s cooler, his song will be slower and the notes will be more spread out.
So reliable is this living, breathing thermometer that farmers have been using it for millennia and the actual scientific formula for cricket song as a temperatures gauge was described fully by the American scientist Amos Dolbear, in a scientific article that he published in 1897 in "The American Naturalist."
In his ‘the cricket as a thermometer’ paper, Dolbear suggested that there is a proportional relationship between the temperature and the rate of the insect’s chirps. Using his mathematical formula, we can calculate with some precision the current temperature.
Calculating the temeperature in degrees Celsius (°C) is actually easier than you might think: simply count the number of chirps per minute and add 30, then divide this figure by 7.
Image 1: Pixabay
Image 2: Wikipedia
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