2. Katydids-All Night Long

The Essay celebrates the musicality of Earth’s insect singers. 2-Katydids all night long. Naturalist & sound recordist Wil Hershberger hunts the sounds & songs of a multitude of North America's stridulating wonders for his ever-expanding website Songs of Insects. "Creating some kind of a sound was perhaps the best and only way for these species to communicate over long distances. And I'm sure it started out with some kind of incidental sound, tapping a body part against some hard surface, whatever it was. It finally developed and evolved into this gorgeous, complex system that they use now, the richness of the coursing of all of these different insects and their different songs. It's probably the first song of the planet Earth. And it's one of those things that gives you goosebumps, that this sound has lasted for hundreds of millions of years and still continues today."
Evolutionary biologist Charlie Woodrow journeys deep into tropical rain forests with head torch & recording device to encounter spiny devil katydids and seek the ever-elusive Supersonus; some are all but invisible, many project their love songs into the realms of ultra sound. "They are the most acoustically diverse group of organisms on the planet, in terms of just the pitch of sound alone. They vary from around 600 hertz, so a very low pitch kind of, kind of the frequency of communication for for human language, up to the most ultrasonic insect sounds in nature."
https://songsofinsects.com/identification-basics
As told to producer Mark Burman.
All Katydid recordings courtesy of Wil Hershberger, Charlie Woodrow with the Eocene team & Lisa Rainsong.
A Storyscape Production for BBC Radio 3