Trying to get to sleep on a sweltering Mediterranean summer's night is difficult enough at the best of times, especially when you are being serenaded by a horde of noisy insects. Male crickets court females by rubbing their forewings together to produce a song composed of a series of chirps. Each chirp is made up of syllables that are produced when the cricket closes his wings, producing a racket as loud as a pneumatic drill! The cricket therefore faces a challenging problem - how can it prevent itself going deaf from singing so loudly, yet still be able to hear what is going on around it? James Poulet and Berthold Hedwig at the University of Cambridge have discovered the clever mechanism the crickets use to stop deafening themselves; unfortunately, it is not as simple as sticking fingers in their ears! They found that a male cricket's nervous system dampens down the response to self-generated sounds, so he can concentrate on listening to his rivals whilst remaining alert to the presence of hungry predators.
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