Auditory Perception in Insects, with Special Reference to the Cockroach

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Abstract
A survey of the literature indicates that the evidence favors sound perception or hearing in insects, even apart from the morphological evidences. Negative results may in some cases have been due to technique (Cf. the observations by Hopkins on cicadas with those of Fabre); in other cases the sounds used may have been of a kind that meant nothing biologically in the lives of the insects; in still other cases, surroundings may have caused a difference, as when ants were observed at home in their own nests or in places strange to them. Insects were in song long before man came upon earth, and "there is good palaeontological evidence that grasshoppers not greatly different from present day forms fiddled away among the carboniferous ferns and enlivened the dense atmosphere of preadamic times" (Riley, 1874); and Zeuner (1934) in tracing the evolution of fiddle and of ear in locusts and crickets from the upper Palaeozoic says in Tettigoniidae and Gryllidae, the ear in the tibia of the foreleg, is evidently older than the musical apparatus. Insects use sound primarily with biological meaning to call and charm mates, as in the crickets and katydids; to escape danger, as in the roach; to compete with rivals for mates; to call members of the same colony as in social insects; and finally to express the pure joy of living.

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