After an amazing day at the Georgia Aquarium, excited for #SICB2025 to get underway! I'll be speaking about jumping spider locomotion, and why it's weird (and cool) on Tuesday the 7th in the "Moving on Up" session at 10:30 am. Lots of great talks in that session!

Acoustics theory from as far back as the 50s actually suggests that a hard surface can indeed increase sound radiation efficiency. This should also be true for dipoles (wings moving back and forth like crickets) and monoples (making sound from a voicebox, like wolves and frogs)

First, let’s look at Oecanthus henryi, a famous baffle-builder that we know stands to gain a lot of efficiency from baffle use. Sure enough, our models suggest that they would do much better with a baffle than calling from the ground.

Being 1m off the ground is almost identical to open air. Things get messier calling from the ground. Instead of smooth, broad peaks and valleys, we see small, choppy features. The "ground effect" is thought to impede females in localizing mates BUT…

Lo and behold, all measured crickets would gain efficiency with a baffle. The red line shows the optimal radiator size for every frequency of call (equivalent to using a baffle). The entire cricket acoustic-morphospace is left of the line! But this is under ideal conditions...

Next, we made models to determine the efficiency of sound radiation across the acoustic-morphospace, with and without a baffle. We used finite element methods first, with wings suspended in a sphere of air. Here's some of those sound fields for different size/freq combinations.

With these data, we were able to determine the acoustic-morphospace of radiator size and call frequency that most crickets should occupy.

We first defined the acoustic-morphospace of crickets. Efficiency of sound radiation (how loud you are) is determined by size of the radiator (wings) and frequency of call We found these values for 112 species across 7 clades. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...