Count cricket chirps for X seconds and and Y to get the temperature. How did somebody first come up with this stuff? Who had the time to sit around and figure out the formula? Didn’t our forefathers have more pressing things to do?
It’s a warm summer evening, long before electricity.
You are sitting outside with a belly full of roasted meat, your mate sitting beside you.
You can look at stars, count cricket chirps, or make small talk. Choose wisely.
What? Watch YouTube videos and update their Facebook status? No, they didn’t have anything better to do.
StG
it’s not hard to have adjacent nights where you have a 10F or more difference in evening temperature and notice a chirp difference. once the idea is had you measure and document it. stare at the data for a while then you find a pattern.
My boyfriend’s dad told me that you count six weeks out from the first night you hear crickets chirping to see when the first frost will be. By his logic, our first frost here (NE Indiana) should be September 24th. It was 95 yesterday, 92 today, we’ll see if he’s right.
I highly doubt the crickets know when the first frost will be. Their chirping is affected by the current temperature though.
- note - not to be inserted rectally
Dammit. NOW you tell me! :o
The answer to the last question is, Not always. There was a lot of down time in the Olden Days.
As for your first question, it seems to me that this ranks pretty low on the “How did they ever figure that out?” amazement scale. It’s a pretty logical progression:
- Notice that crickets seem to chirp more rapidly on warmer nights.
- Wonder if there’s a precise correlation, with a law or formula describing the relationship.
- Collect some data: on a bunch of different occasions, record the temperature and the number of cricket chirps per minute.
- List the data, and possibly plot it on a graph.
- Come up with a linear equation that fits the data.
No one of these steps is much of a leap from the previous one, to a sciencey-minded person.
How do you keep them under your tongue?