Cricket's dwelling and eggs
The cricket is one of the more famous insects that people are familiar with. It lives in meadows and its song and shelter are quite distinctive. The master of fables, La*Fontaine, has described and celebrated it in poetry. Another fableist also said in the tone of the cricket: "How I love my deep seclusion! To live a happy life, hide here!"
I have witnessed crickets curling their tentacles at the entrance of their burrows, with their bellies to the shade and their backs to the sun ......Crickets' burrows are usually dug in the grass on sunrise slopes. The advantage of this is that rainwater from outside the burrow can quickly run off the slope instead of pouring directly into the burrow. The passage of the burrow is about a finger's breadth, and the whole depth is at most nine inches. Its course is sometimes zigzag and sometimes straight, conforming as far as possible to the changes in the ground. The crickets leave a tuft of grass at the mouth of their burrow, this to keep the rain out of the burrow, and again to conceal the entrance to protect the whole. Whenever it is quiet around them, they will play in the grass at the entrance of the burrow.
The inside of the cricket's burrow isn't luxurious, but it's not rough either. The bedroom is at the end of the cave's passageway, and is the most spacious and sleek in comparison. The whole cave is simple, clean and hygienic. The cricket treasures its hard-earned shelter. Neither in spring nor in winter does it move. Among insects, the cricket is the only one that has a fixed residence and enjoys a peaceful and quiet life alone. Crickets usually choose a hygienic environment and a sunny place as their residence.
The cricket is so sensitive that it hears even the lightest of footsteps and immediately flees into its burrow. But there are ways to lure it out of its burrow. You can put a straw into the hole and shake it a few times, then it will be curious and use its sensitive tentacles to test the situation, and then crawl out again, which is how you can catch it. However, if you fail to catch it the first time by using the straw as bait, it will be difficult to catch it in this way in the future. Then you can flush it out with a glass of water. In short, the cricket's dwelling is far superior to that of all other animals, and only man, in the art of building dwellings, is superior to it.
After the introduction of the cricket's burrow, let us now see how the cricket lays its eggs. If you want to see crickets lay eggs, all it takes is a little patience, and not much money spent on preparation. Buffon makes this patience genius. I think that's somewhat of an exaggeration, and it's better to call it the most valuable quality of an observer. We keep pairs of country crickets in pots containing subsoil in April or, at the latest, in May. The food given them was lettuce leaves. To keep the food fresh, change it once in a while each. To prevent the crickets from escaping, a glass plate was placed over the pots. With this rudimentary device, we can obtain a lot of very meaningful information. If desired, a cage made of good quality metal mesh can be utilized as an auxiliary device. What goes on in the metal cage will be given later. Now let's observe the spawning process, we have to be on high alert or we will miss the great opportunity to witness the cricket spawning with our own eyes.
By the first week of June, the persistent work of observation was beginning to pay off satisfactorily when I suddenly saw a female cricket standing motionless, sticking her egg-laying tube vertically into the soil. It paid no attention to my impolite peeping, but remained fixed on one point for a long time. Finally it pulled out its spawner and very casually picked at it a few times, feeling away at the hole. It rested a little, moved to another spot, and resumed inserting the spawner into the soil. It inserted it here and there, spotting all the places that could be used for spawning, and after four hours, the spawning seemed to be over, but I waited patiently for two more days to be on the safer side of things. After two days had passed, I began to search the soil for egg particles. The eggs were straw yellow in color, about three millimeters long, and cylindrical in shape. The eggs were inserted one by one vertically and vertically in the soil, not touching each other, but very close together. In order to find out the number of eggs laid by the female cricket each time, I carefully observed the pile of soil for a long time with a magnifying glass, and estimated from the results of the observation that one egg-laying process of each female cricket is about fifteen or sixteen hundred grains, and that such a large family would certainly undergo a large-scale culling in a very short period of time.
No cricket egg is itself a subtle little mechanical system. The egg shell of the larva when it has finished hatching resembles a white tube with a very neat circular hole at the top and a round cap along the periphery of the hole that becomes a lid. This lid does not open automatically when the newborn pushes the top blindly or destroys it with scissors, but along a specially prepared line of texture and its fragility. It's a marvelous incubation process that we should all be well informed about.
About two weeks after the egg is laid, two large black-on-red dots appear at the front of the shell, which are the beginnings of the eye. Slightly forward of these two dots, at the top of the cylinder, a slender, microscopic annular gasket is now visible, which is the fracture line in the process of formation. Soon, through the translucent egg shell, you can see all parts of the body of the little animal inside. At this point, it is important to pay extra attention and increase the time and frequency of observation, especially in the morning.
Good fortune always favors those who are patient. The hard labor I put in was finally rewarded with satisfaction. After some exquisite work, the microform washer has been braided into a line of very low resistance, at which point the little being in the egg gives a push with its forehead, and the lid is lifted up along its own perimeter, and subsequently falls aside. The cricket emerged from the eggshell as if it had popped a little monster out of a doll's ensemble.
The cricket is born wearing a coat. But it shed this coat at the mouth of the eggshell. At this point it was covered in gray and white. After wrestling with the dirt that covered it and sweeping away obstacles, it burrowed out of the ground. But at this point it was still very thin and weak, the size of a flea. It was a challenge for its survival, but fortunately it was very agile.
I was afraid that I couldn't take care of these little guys, so I put them in my garden. I didn't realize that all these crickets in my garden were wiped out by ants and other dastardly insects. I had to go outside the garden to continue to observe and learn about the crickets.
One day in August, I was in a meadow and saw that the cricket had grown large and had turned from white when it was born to black. At this time, it had no place to live. Mid-autumn is also wandering, but also suffered from the yellow-winged flying locust mud peak pursuit. Until the end of the month, the cold weather, the cricket began to I home - digging burrows. After the burrow is dug, it digs and maintains it without interruption to make it more spacious and comfortable.
Cricket's singing
In the previous section, I introduced you to the cricket's home and its egg-laying, but here we will talk about the cricket's singing and mating. Like other insects, crickets also sing. The instrument used for singing is simple: a rack, a bow and a vibrating membrane.
Unlike other insects, the cricket is right-handed, with its right sheath wing covering almost all of its left sheath wing. However, both of its sheath wings have exactly the same structure. Both sheaths consist of a broad, transparent membrane, as thin as white onion skin, which vibrates and is the site of the cricket's genesis. There are two wing veins in the center of the sheath wings. Between the two wing veins there is a depression, and in this depressed space there are five or six black wrinkles. These wrinkles form the friction arteries, which create the conditions for vibrations to occur. One of the two wing veins, cut in a serrated shape, is the arch. It *** has about 150 serrations, all in the shape of trigonometry. What's even better is that it knows iambic pentameter, adjusting the intensity of its sound as needed.
Can crickets sing with their instruments upside down? The results of my experiment proved the answer to be yes. But I still didn't stop there. I went to the cricket's larva and watched for the moment when it molted and morphed. At this point, its wings and sheaths look like tiny, wrinkled flakes. One day in early May I finally saw it molt, and it threw off its ragged, coarse clothing. The rest of it was maroon red except for the sheath wings and wings which were pure white. When the cricket first came out of its coat its wings and sheath wings were small and wrinkled and tattered looking. But then the sheath wings would slowly grow. Then I noticed that the edges of the two sheath wings were touching and the right one was about to cover the sheath wing. I then used a blade of grass to gently change the order of the overlapping sheaths, placing the left sheath on top of the right, and it worked, although it sometimes didn't cooperate well. By about 3 p.m. that afternoon, the cricket had turned from a light red color to black, and thus the cricket's sheath wings had grown to maturity as a result of my intervention. Soon it began to play with this bow, which no member of its family had ever used. And it had normal pitch and rhythm.
After talking about the cricket's instruments, let's listen to its music! The cricket always loves to sing in front of its house on a warm sunny day. Its sheathed wings emit a soft "klicky" trilling sound that is mellow, loud and rhythmic. It sings like this all spring long, without interruption. I have never heard another insect with such a beautiful, clear song. The crickets that sing at night in my garden are also very numerous, and there is a chorus of them in every cluster of mountain roses and on every bouquet of lavender.
Not only that, but the crickets confuse people by adjusting the strength and height of their song so that you hallucinate and can't recognize where it is.
People who want to keep their crickets in their own cages for viewing are allowed to do so, because I have a cricket that is now accustomed to life in a cage. It sings just as well. And it survives twice as long as its partner in the wild on grass. The reason for this is that it leads a very peaceful life and has not lost its body to over-consumption of pleasure.
The smallest of the cricket family, the bordeaux cricket, often chirps under the boxwood tree in front of our house. In the fields, the symphony of crickets has more members. While spring days are filled with field crickets, summer nights are filled with tree crickets (also known as Italian crickets). This Italian cricket is slender and white. It lives on small shrubs or tall grasses and rarely comes to the ground. It can be heard singing from July through October, and their song is a slow, soft "kriyi yi yi yi," which is very beautiful.
Male and female crickets don't live together; they both prefer to live in their own homes. Even if they live far apart, the silent female cricket can hear the male cricket and find him. Judging from my observations, the male cricket will also have a way of finding the silent female cricket. Even though sometimes they are in danger or even die on their long road trips, he is not afraid and does not flinch.
But even among crickets there is no peace, no struggle. They still have quarrels, especially two male crickets in a piece will often fight for love, their head with a very strong helmet. They bite each other on the top of the head or wrestle until a winner is determined. The loser slinks away, while the winner struts and sings his way to the female cricket's side. At this point she doesn't forget to stretch out her tentacles and groom herself with her saliva. It stamps or kicks its feet impatiently. Its sheathed wings are twitching, but no chirping sound comes out, and it is so excited that it can't sing. Nevertheless, the female cricket does not immediately accept the other, but runs away and hides in the grass, but does not discard the other, but is merely testing the other. What is the difference between this and our earthly flirting and romantic chasing and frolicking between lovers?