My Life with Crickets, Frogs and Bees

The sex life of crickets, the hearing of frogs, the visual capacity of bees. Vivek Nityananda reports on the sleepless nights and surprising pleasures of his arcane pursuits

When I was a young boy—that is, just the other day—I read a book called Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thomspon Seton. I was introduced to such delightful characters as Ragglug the rabbit, Bingo the dog, and, most of all, Lobo, king of Currumpaw, a hungry wolf on the Prairies of New Mexico. Now this book may or may not have slyly contributed to my adult self’s choice of career, but as life would have it, I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years in close contact with animals, investigating such decidedly arcane things as the sex life of crickets, the hearing mechanisms of frogs, and, more recently, how bees see. As you might imagine, this makes for unusual party conversation when—as modern life dictates—I am politely asked: “ So, what do you do?”  My job is no doubt a source of healthy entertainment at such points, sometimes leading to laughter, sometimes to delight and curiosity, far too often to a glazing of the eyes and an abrupt termination of that particular strand of conversation. “Weirdo!” I can hear their brain cells whisper.

I recover my composure with the thought that no other profession could be a better source of puns. My hours of observation are relieved by the opportunity to mutter “Bee quiet” to an exceptionally pesky study subject, or to speculate about newbees (a fresh colony) or tubbees (the plump ones that have just gorged themselves on sugar solution and are weaving their way back to the colony). But puns have a dark side, too. Their pleasures pale when my mention of ‘cricket’ leads to the hundredth attempt at showing off faux cover drive skills. The good ones are people who merely misunderstand. They are the people who think my research on cricket courtship focused on Dhoni and Deepika, bless them.

Yes, it’s a tough life for a good-for-nothing paid to do something he enjoys. So, in the spirit of Thompson Seton, let me attempt an introduction to my entourage—that is to say, not individual beasts I have loved and admired (who has time for that when you’re trying to up the sample size of your study?), but rather species which I’ve subjected to bizarre forms of entertainment, just to see what they do.

Outside of China, crickets don’t have a major fan following. They turn up here and there in movies and books, by turns cheery and sanctimonious, but they’re not quite up there with polar bears. They’re a bit too noisy, a bit too small, a bit too much like cockroaches. I’d argue that they have musical calls, that small is beautiful, and so too are cockroaches. Guess I’m in a minority, but they are charming creatures. They are also private creatures, hiding in daytime and coming out only when no one can see them. Old-fashioned parenting might suggest the reverse, but crickets believe in being heard not seen. Males call, females choose, researchers interrupt. It’s a simple life cycle. So there I was skipping dinner, spending nights in the tall grass or in a soundproof chamber trying to get them to give interviews. When they called, though, they wouldn’t stop—and the ones I studied were bloody noisy. When they were in the mood, I could get a lot out of them: how they managed to synchronise their calls like auditory fireflies, whom they responded to and why. It took many years but they were helpful enough.

A field season is a rum thing. Your work hangs on three or four months of the year necessarily being productive. In practice, though, it helped structure my work year nicely. If it’s August, it must be fieldwork; if it’s December, it must be statistics. That’s how one keeps one’s sanity in the lean periods.

They got me to drag myself across two continents to make their acquaintance, but then insisted on a date only between May and July. So I soldiered through the cold Minnesotan winter dreaming up what I could learn from them. And when they finally came out, it was an explosion. Hundreds of them filled up the ponds. These males blasted our eardrums at the smallest sight of a female, and the females were more than their match in amorousness, ever ready to respond. Those croakers sure knew how to make the most of their three-month long mating season. We spent all the time we could around them: collecting them, releasing them, playing out strange versions of their mating calls to them. Yes, it was a heady time, with the ups and downs of data collection being underwritten by the hum of sleeplessness. The good news was that I wasn’t waiting long hours for the males to call any longer. I could instead spend all day seeing if the female could detect mating calls in different types of noise, and thereby, figuring out how hearing works. The bad news was the fieldwork now came with the added joy of wading through a chilly pond at midnight, trying to spot mating frogs on the surface of the water in the narrow beam of a torchlight. In the long run, of course, it’s exactly moments like those that you end up cherishing. Trawling a Midwestern pond at night? Who’d have imagined it?

Bees have it all. They surprise you with how smart they can be – learning, colours, odours, associations, A large wooden box with coloured chips is not exactly a natural environment for them to be out foraging in. So you spend hours training them with sugar solution rewards to distinguish two colours, or that pattern from this one, and once you finally train them, you can suddenly ask all sorts of interesting stuff about how they see the world and how they remember what they saw. Therein lies the difference between bees and crickets and frogs. Bees might have a world of PR behind them, but you’ve to put in your time before you get the fun stuff. Crickets and frogs? Play them a mating call and they’re raring to go. It’s an interesting biological question that no doubt many of us have had to tackle: which is a greater motivator, hunger or lust?

That’s a fine thought-provoking note to end on, so I think I’ll get myself something to eat as well. After all, the bees can’t have all the fun.

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