Midnight Musicians

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Dr. A.A. Quraishy

Most of the members in the category of “midnight musicians” are humble, cheerful, and strong, for throughout their life they have to be proficient acrobats and athletic.

If challenged, they fight like a knight to save honor and hold their dignity high. They will do anything to brighten their image and prestige from tarnishing. Vigilant and agile, they spend hours grooming their looks and twirling the long sensitive moustaches. All members possess this main appendage, without which they shall be severely handicapped. Dry, clean and light-hearted, these remarkably optimistic playboys are musicians by birth.

The Cricket

If any creature on our vast earth ever believed seriously in music being the food of soul, it is him and some relatives in this clan who can sing during daytime but being a connoisseur, they take to the delicate art only when the weather is comfortably warm to pep up their sprits. Sensitive and decent, they hold a privileged place in insect society.

Please do not take him lightly. He may appear dry, drab and duffer to human eye, but he is a refined love, trained in etiquette and holds a master's degree in music. He is tenacious and this untiring prodigy can sing for life, emitting a sound of peace, of longing, to mesmerize his love, in defiance. To make his presence known without him the darkness of the night would rust in vain, lifeless and meaningless, for he and his community provide remarkable background music to the summer, striking a note of comradeship to a lonely soul wilderness. It cheers him up even from distance, without a physical heartwarming handshake, for his trill, in an odd way, can abound sweet to the human ears.

All of them a happy lot: gay or glamorous, carefree and jovial, for they are from free from the curse of nagging by the housewife, very few of whom can start an annoying argument, and who do, say so little, always is a flattering and encouraging tone - the classic partners.

To illustrate my point, here is a skit about katydid (a bush cricket). The male calls and the female answers him by a thick tone and when she responds with him whether she is fully ready for the nuptial chamber. Mood-wise, when he receives the maximum response, he moves over the bush or plant on which she perched if he lands on a bush or a plant near her. He calls and she answers, so he takes off again. Once he lands on the same plant as she is on, there is silence because she, seeing him or feeling him land sways gently and shakes the plant so he can find her.

No wonder he can sing in peace, in harmony, for pleasure meaningfully and in good cheer, producing modulations, regulating the timbre in bringing about refinement, improvising the melody, strumming and thrumming in leisure, with gusto.

Reverting to the texas bush cricket, we find that that in the morning and middle of the day he makes no sounds in the late afternoon and evening he makes short lisp sounds lasting for less than a minute. At twilight he makes a soft ticking sound, which can be heard, only a few feet away, interspersed with occasional fast pulses. As darkness sets in, a slow-pulsed song is added; a fast pulse and then a pause follows each slow pulse, and as night wears on, fast pulse get longer and longer until late at night the fast one may last half an hour or more before the slow is produced. Therefore, it is not a simple case of the katydid singing a monotonously produced song, but of a changing song as the light fades.

Largely, the song of katydids and, presumably of all the bush crickets, grasshoppers and true crickets are influenced by the intensity of light. In others, of which the texas bush katydid is one, certain sounds are produced day by day, others in twilight and yet of others in full day light. In a few species, the same sounds are produced by day and by night. The link between different intensities of light is well brought out when a katydid singing in the afternoon sunlight, changes to his twilight song when cloud passes overhead.

In spite of these generalizations, a male of any of these may change his song for a while without any intensity of light. Presumably, it is some change within the insect itself that causes alterations in the song. Another change comes when one male replies to his fellow being. He calls and keeps quiet to listen to a reply: the first replies and waits once more, for the second to do his solo.

When the population is dense, the pitch is a whisper; they sing loud when living at distance, say more than 300 yards. A male changes his pitch when a challenger is approaching. Therefore, it is a song between man-to-man, first to make his presence felt, subsequently to meet a challenge.

I had mentioned earlier about their being sensitive beings. The thermometer cricket is one, who lives on trees and is very sensitive to temperature while singing. The rate of the chirps is speeded up as the temperature rises, which can be calculated quite correctly by timing them. You count the chirps in 15 seconds and add 39. If you have a thermometer and no watch, the cricket can be used as a timer; just multiply the temperature by four and subtract 150 to find the number of chirps uttered per minute.

Not all crickets sing alike. Grasshopper bows with his thigh bones. Standing on his hands, be lifts his back legs until the femurs rub against a line of stiff pegs on the wings. This produces that dead battery sounds in the summer meadow. He has a flight song too. As he takes off he snaps two big top wings against the smaller inside ones and produces that familiar crackle that grasshopper jumps.

The loudest members are the “drummers,” that literally beat the one object against the other. The cicadas are classical drummers. The sounds they make are courtship calls a buzz saw high in the treetops that begin softly and rises to a frantic ear-splitting climax. The cicada's noisemaking instruments are the most complicated sound organs found in the animal kingdom. The cicada has not only drumheads that he vibrates by pulling them with powerful muscles, but his amplifying system makes katydid's mega-phones mere toys.

From our point of view, deathwatch beetles are a loser for he produces his lilting music by banging his head against the wood to beat a tune. He does this inside his burrow in woodwork and in old furniture, and, in certain cases, can go on for years without a fair lady turning up in response. However, he knows that his labor for love will not be lost. One fine morning a soft hand of a fair lady ends his physical agony and mental anguish. I suspect that his spouse must be hard of the hearing and the poor fellow must be having a severe headache. Therefore, the girls must be moving about with an aspirin in their purse.

Interestingly enough, nature did not leave him alone in the odd mode of courtship. A male millipede (a worm with dozens of legs and, when touched, it curls up in defense and nervousness) of the British Isles bangs his head on the ground at a rate of five times a second to attract a male (at least he has some sense of proportion).

The South African pill millipede is a little wiser after witnessing the sad plight of his cousin. He resorts to a screeching love call, which can be heard by the human ear at fifteen feet. He has no vocal cords like the higher animals and his managing a call is enigmatic. Mechanism apart, it is better than banging the head against a wall.

Mechanism brings to my mind the means by which a jowly cricket can create such a loud sound. He has no lungs, teeth or a sound box as we know these organs; how, then, could the sound be produced? The katydid you know him well now, lifts a wing and runs the edge over some or more saw-like points on the other wing. At the base of the wings are miniaturized amplifiers less than one eight of an inch in size, composed of chitin—the strong stuff from which the outside skeleton of the insect is made. This tiny disc-shaped device can amplify an almost inaudible scratch into a cracking zeep that can be heard for a mile.

I have not still understood how it happens but here is the tailpiece. The smallest cricket living in the northern hemisphere is about one-fifth of an inch when fully grown. He lives in the ants nest and feeds on the oil secretion of the ant. It is puzzling that it is so, for every time the cricket nudges and prods the sides of the ant, the latter would, in all probability, feel tickled or annoyed. How could oil be oozing out from the hard, impervious covering of the ant? What should the quantity of the oil be? How could one live on oil alone unless he was a peanut product? Let our entomologists throw light on them.

As I was writing, my wife asked me about the topic. I narrated to her the three-knock episode and resume writing. Soon I heard two knocks. I turned and saw that she holds a cup of tea for me, “Henceforth, I shall never knock thrice” said she and left.

I hope you will agree that “Tuk” is happy sound.