Reply to comment

I’ve been thinking about crickets lately.  It may be because I was always under the false impression that you could get a cricket to chirp just by turning off the lights (a half-truth they told us in elementary school) but I am still trying to work out the input/output conundrum.  Lauren offered “perhaps there is some other input in his mind that he associates with the female, hence the chirping. This input could be a product of conditioning, of anticipation, or of the unconscious…He’s consciously unaware of it, despite his brain's awareness. Could his mind and body be sensing something that he isn’t aware of? Is the unconscious a type of input that conveys an output?”  Frankly Lauren, I have no idea.  This is very interesting to me and I’m sure to a lot of other people as well. 

Would it be helpful to think of male chirping in terms of “types” of chirps?  Is there a spectrum of “meaning” (and by meaning, I mean function) behind volume and frequency of the noise depending on varying inputs?  For example, I was browsing through some random webpages on cricket behavior and on http://insected.arizona.edu/cricketinfo.htm I found a useful observation: “Male songs can be quite loud.”  Does the chirping increase in volume when there is no female response?  How long would one need to observe a male cricket without a female input to spark this behavior in order to see?  What happens when the brain finally tells the lonely male to shut the heck up because there’s no booty in sight tonight?  If Lauren is correct and crickets are capable of anticipating a biological function, do our observations provide new answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose? 

If it helps to talk in human terms about involuntary behavior, how about those recent studies that found women are more likely to bare their legs when they’re ovulating than during any other time of the month?  Seriously, who comes up with these?  Seems to me that ovulating human females are equivalent to the male crickets chirping for absent females – they are unconscious actions based on some inner unknown trigger with one goal in mind: procreation, perhaps the strongest biological drive.  Any thoughts?