#stridulation

I’m just festive like that 🎄

Maybe I should actually change it to that just for christmas

Whattttttr

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Oowee I like my horse :3

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Qing Emperors use to be like: “Only the most prestigious vegetable designer homes for my crickets!”

🎶🦗🎶

I’ve been good!!! :D obsessively playing Umamusume

I’m saving up for 4 back-to-back gachas so the grind never stops 🫡

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This is my baby

Plus I get to go up north this weekend ^_^ I’m gonna swim in a lake :3 how’ve you been??

We out here, stridulating off key

Can you hear it bzzzzzzz? (Rhantus exsoletus)

We can speak with our mouths the way we do because our mouths lead right to our lungs. The insect respiratory system is laid out completely differently: they breathe through small holes called spiracles that line the sides of their body. Some arachnids at least can stridulate with their mouthparts, but without a way to force air through their mouths, they couldn’t talk the same way we do. No air flow, no vowels!

Some insects can control their breathing with lung-like air sacs behind the spiracles. The aptly named Madagascar hissing cockroach makes its hisses that way.

There’s also stridulation. Grasshoppers make sounds by rubbing their legs against their wings. Cicadas make sounds by rubbing their wings together. Bess beetles can make a wide variety of sounds for communication by rubbing different parts of their bodies together.

Taking those facts together, you could possibly get something going with the legs or wings interacting with the spiracles somehow. Stridulation for consonants, spiracles for vowels. Maybe even the spiracles would be enough–parrots do all their talking with just the syrinx, after all!

With all these spiracles, though, it might seem as though your insect person is speaking in many voices simultaneously. Neat!

Cigales qui stridulent (on appelle cela “Cymbalisation”). Celle de gauche pourrait être un mâle (???) car au bout de son abdomen, on dirait des pièces sexuelles (sous toutes réserves !) - Mas des Tourelles, Beaucaire, Gard, Languedoc, France, Europe, Monde !

Dragons that sing like crickets or grasshoppers

Dragons that rub their back legs together while they repose and their scales scrape melodiously and fill the cave with the sound of windchimes

Dragons that rub their legs against the edge of their wings when they’re searching for a mate, and together their song echoes harmoniously through the mountain gorges

Lonely old dragons singing to themselves like the wind across a grassy plain

Just. Dragons that stridulate.

I’ve had this idea in my head for a while; and I’m still extremely surprised that I’m the only person I’ve seen thus far to do vessels stridulating. Come on HK fandom, these are bugs! If they can’t talk normally, let them stridulate instead! XD

(I would have put the stridulating structures on just the cloak, like with cricket wings- but I couldn’t figure out how to pose that and thus went for a more grasshopper-like approach instead, with some of the structures on the proximal/ventral surface of a limb.)

Dans le froid lugubre de cette matinée maussade, je sonde au fond de mon coeur les stridulations estivales des cigales.

More ant stridulations 

An Album Made By Ants. Warning: contains euphoric stridulation.

Meadow grasshopper (Chorthippus parallelus) stridulating in order to attract mates, by rubbing a rasp on its hind legs against its thick forewing, Ripley, 04/07/17 #meadowgrasshopper #grasshopper #stridulation #chorthippus (at Ripley, Surrey)

Highland Streaked Tenrec

Highland streaked tenrecs have barbed, detachable quills covering their body, which are more pronounced around the crown. They have thick fur located between their quills and are blackish-brown in color with longitudinal whitish streaks. Their crown and forehead are black, and their underparts are creamy-white and less spiny. Along the back of highland streaked tenrecs are sensory hairs similar to whiskers. There is a specialized area on their rear called the stridulating organ that is attached to approximately 11 non-detachable quills that are used for communication. They have a long, pointed snout and lack a tail. Their skull has an elongate rostrum and their dentition is reduced in size, which is most likely an adaptation to eating relatively soft invertebrates.

Highland streaked tenrecs (H. nigriceps) are found in humid forest and plateau savanna boundary habitat in the central upland portion of Madagascar. Lowland streaked tenrecs (H. semispinosus) are found in tropical rainforest habitats while highland streaked tenrecs (H. nigriceps) are found in both tropical rainforest and savanna habitats. Their ranges were not thought to overlap, but they were found coexisting in the widely varied habitat of Mahatsinjo Forest in 2000, which led researchers to believe that they were separate species rather than subspecies.

Highland streaked tenrecs actively forage in leaf litter in areas where soil is damp, soft and shaded for earthworms and other soft-bodied invertebrates. They forage both individually and in groups. Highland streaked tenrecs may stomp with both forepaws on the ground to stimulate earthworm activity. When feeding, they pivot their rumps from side to side to ward off other tenrecs that may try to take the worms from them. Highland streaked tenrecs are very preoccupied when feeding and become much easier for humans to handle. In captivity, an otherwise aggressive tenrec was undisturbed by being handled when eating.

Lowland Streaked Tenrec

The Lowland Streaked Tenrec lives only in eastern Madagascar, where it is found in the forest near bodies of water. This extraordinary little mammal is an insectivore, which means that it only eats insects, and this tenrec dines primarily on earthworms. Its body is covered with a mixture of fur and quills, some of which are barbed and detachable. When threatened, the tenrec will raise the quills around its neck and lunge toward a predator, causing the quills to lodge into flesh and detach. This small creature only weighs 7.5 ounces at most, and is approximately 6 inches long at adulthood, including the tail.

The Lowland Streaked Tenrec lives in underground burrows in family groups, which is a unique social behavior among tenrecs. Burrows may hold up to 20 individuals, and are disguised with detritus that the tenrecs use to cover burrow entrances and exits. A “toilet” site is located outside of the burrow. Family members forage together both during the day and night, searching the leaf litter for insects with their sensitive, pointed snouts.

The Streaked Tenrec has developed a novel method of communication which no other mammal uses; stridulation. Stridulation is the rubbing together of certain body parts to produce sound, and the Streaked Tenrec achieves this end with its quills. The tenrec vibrates specialized, permanent quills on its back to produce an insect-like chirping noise that is used to communicate with family members, primarily while foraging. These noises are undetectable to the human ear, but, using a device that converts bat ultrasounds into audible frequencies, BBC managed to capture and film the stridulation of the Streaked Tenrec. This video clip is the first and only recording of tenrecs communicating with their quills.

Word Press Animal of the Day

can’t wait Σ੧(❛□❛✿)

#macro #stridulation #SkenderLake

The male lesser water boatman, aka Micronecta scholtzi, can create mating calls as loud as 99.2 decibels, which is the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a loud, full-blown orchestra, or standing 15 meters away from a hurtling freight train.

“Remarkably,” said Stratchclyde University’s James Windmill in a press release, “even though 99 percent of sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river.”