Crickets: The Arrhenius Equation Of Cricket

Every night, before you go to sleep, you hear the chirping of hundreds of crickets. From mole crickets to a cricket literally called the cooloola monster, every male cricket can chirp. Now, what if I told you that crickets don’t chirp at random, but the speed of the chirps depends on the temperature outside.
If I have a male house cricket and put it in a temperature controlled room and turn up the heat. Since crickets like all other insects, cold-blooded, they take on the temperature of their surroundings. Cricket chirping falls under an equation called the Arrhenius equation which is that the higher the temperature, the faster a given chemical reaction can occur. The Arrhenius equation, in a deeper explanation, says that at higher temperatures, the probability of two …show more content…
The snowy cricket is one of the easiest ways of telling if crickets chirps speed up in hot weather and slows down in cold weather.
Many equations have been made to describe the relationship between the number of chirps per second and the temperature. Each equation varies slightly depending on where you find the equation and on what species of cricket you are using because remember there are over 900 species of crickets out there in the world.The snowy cricket is easiest and most accurate species at predicting temperatures.
One of the oldest and easiest to use equations to test a cricket thermometer is published in the “Farmers’ Almanac” a book updated each year and used to predict the temperature and the weather. In the book it says that if you want to get the temperature in degrees fahrenheit you would need count the number of chirps over a fourteen-second time period and then add 40. The equation would look something like this:
Tf = N14+40
Tf meaning the temperature outside in fahrenheit and N14 meaning the number of chirps per fourteen