Be amazed and surprised

Fatal attraction: cicadas chirping attracts friend and foe

The summer chirping of the male cicadas is actually cicadas-female attract. Often, however, females are a different species of flying – with a fatal outcome.

For some of the meat, the sounds of the summer is to fly love to advertise male cicadas are music to the ears.

The fly females lay their eggs on the bodies of the cicadas and the maggots that hatch from the eggs, they will eat their host from the inside.

But not only females are attracted, found out a US-researchers: even male Emblemasoma erro and females without eggs to come flying, lured by the Chirping, on the search for mating-ready partners.

Single market for flesh fly

It was like a “going to a Bar is played with Singles, in the romantic music of Barry White,” it says in a communication to the Entomological society of America (ESA).

It had been unclear whether males of this Meat flying style, your functioning belonging to use it at all, writes the Insektologe Brian Stucky in the “Journal of Insect Science”.

Acoustic Communication

Usually varieties of parasites, their hosts through smell sensors, and so far, it is said, only a few fly species with sensitive hearing.

In studies in the grassy plains of Colorado in 2011 and 2013, Brian Stucky set in three places wooden boxes with speakers, one of which he played the cicadas singing. A quarter of the attracted and the prisoner of meat, three-quarters was to fly male, female, including some without offspring. “Hearing in insects a multi functional sense,” said the Insektologe from the University of Colorado. And in the case of the fly, the hearing may be originally created to be a host, but it have proven to be now also in “other ways” than useful – for example, the search for a partner.

dpa/ db