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A chorus of cricket chirps isn’t just summer background music – it can also be a temperature gauge.
Crickets chirp faster when it’s hotter outside, according to a scientific article published in 1897. In “Cricket as Thermometer,” Amos Dolbear wrote that counting the number of chirps in 15 seconds and adding 40 gets you the temperature in Fahrenheit.
Crickets are cold-blooded animals. Kyle Koch, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said heat helps their muscles warm up to scrape their wings together and produce the chirps.
“Crickets’ bodies are affected by the ambient temperature,” he said. “As the temperature rises, they can have those muscle contracts occurring more rapidly which allows them to have a higher frequency. And as temperatures fall, that chirp rate also starts to decrease.”
Koch said it’s similar to how, for humans, it’s easier to go on a run in June than it is in January.
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