Grasshoppers Change Courtship Tunes to Cope with Urban Noises

Hiiiii!

I bet you thought I would not blog this week. BUT HERE I AM!

Here's a cool article my friend found for me: "Grasshoppers Change Courtship Tunes to Cope with Urban Noises."

And here's the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) version:

Grasshoppers, like many insects, communicate with each other with sounds that they produce. But in urban environments, where the sounds of large industrial vehicles and people and all other man-made things are very loud, grasshoppers have adapted to adjust to these barriers to their effective communication. A team of researchers from the University of Bielefeld in Germany observed the bow-winged grasshoppers from roadsides as well as quieter places. The scientists analyzed more than 1,000 courtship songs that these grasshoppers produced. In a statement, the P.I. Ulrike Lampe described the results: "Bow-winged grasshoppers produce songs that include low and high frequency components. We found that grasshoppers from noisy habitats boost the volume of the lower-frequency part of their song, which makes sense since road noise can mask signals in this part of the frequency spectrum." The researchers believe this is not a "spontaneous behavioral adaptation to noise," but, rather an effect of long-term adaptation to these environmental changes. 

Really cool. I'm interested in knowing if females who are adapted to receive the mating calls can recognize grasshoppers from both noisy and quiet areas as members of the same species to reproduce with. 

If you want more reading, the article was published in Functional Ecology. Clickie here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12000/full.