Crickets Act Differently When Others Are Watching

http://animalzoon.blogspot.in/

Everybody loves an audience—even crickets.

A new study shows that the insects change their aggressive behavior when they know other crickets are watching, the first time this phenomenon has been observed in any invertebrate. Mammals, birds, and fish are all known to be influenced by others.

In recent experiments, male crickets fighting in an arena acted more violently—and upon winning, were more jubilant—when other male or female crickets were in the audience. (See National Geographic's bug videos.)

Found worldwide, crickets live in communities defined by conflicts between individuals, usually to gain access to territories, resources, and mates.

But most previous research has focused on the fighters themselves, without placing them in the social networks in which they live.
Now, the new study reveals that cricket behavior "is much more complex than we give them credit for," said study leader Lauren Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Robert Matthews, a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the study, said, "It's an area that should have been looked at long ago.

"Contests don't occur in isolation," he said. "They always are in a social context."
Taking the Stage

For their experiments, Fitzsimmons and colleagues caught male and female crickets from local fields and reared their offspring in isolation in the laboratory. The team then put pairs of either wild-caught males or laboratory-raised males in a small arena at separate times, which always led to fights.

In a glass-separated viewing area adjacent to the arena, the scientists set up experiments with three audience situations: a male watching a fight, a female watching a fight, or no audience. The lab-raised male fighters had a lab-raised audience, and the wild crickets had a wild-caught audience. (See pictures of the world's deadliest animal battles.)

The researchers then videotaped each fight and played them back in slow motion, noting the aggression and overall behavior of the males in the three separate audience situations.