Leptophyes punctatissima

behaviour · bio.acousti.ca

The male calling song consists of isolated faint 'tick'-like syllables repeated at very variable intervals. Sometimes they are repeated quite regularly every few seconds for long periods (intervals of 1-5 s are commomn), but t other times the intervals may be much longer and occassionally the syllables may be grouped into short sequences during which the repetition rate may be as high as 2/s; generally the syllables are repeated more rapidly at higher temperatures. The number of tooth-impacts within each syllable also varies greatly: 4-6 is common, but as few as 1 or as many as 9 sometimes occur. Frequently the main group of impacts (which is a closing hemisyllable) is followed after a variable interval (usually between 15 and 100 ms) by another one (rarely two), probably produced by a further closure of the fore wings. A hemisyllable of 4-6 impacts usually lasts between 8 and 20 ms. The song is produced both suring the day and at night, but seldom durting the first few daylight hours of the morning.

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behaviour · bio.acousti.ca

The song, produced in the evening and at night, is hardly louder than in L. albovittata; one canheear it from about 50cm. It also consists of a sequence of soft 'zb'-sounds. The intervals bertween the syllables are, however, somewhat shorter (about 3-6 sec. at room temperasture).

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behaviour · bio.acousti.ca

The male calling song consists of single, short syllables presented at intervals of several seconds. The acoustical response behaviour of the female was studied intensively by Hartley and Robinson (1976), Robinson (1980), Robinson et al. (1986) and Zimmermann et al. (1989). Robinson et al. (1986) gave detailed information about the latency times. Here we add data on the temperature dependency of this behaviour (Fig. 1; f(x)=-0.7299x+49.53; r2=0.6336) and demonstrate that the female reaction can be elicited by crude, click-like models of the male song. Females responded very reliably to fingernail snips (Fig. 2A) – acoustically an impulse of about 1 ms or less in duration with most energy in the ultrasonic range. This behaviour is well known in the laboratories working with this species. Rectan- gularly-modulated pulses of white noise with a duration of 15 ms were responded to with about the same latency, measured from the beginning of the pulse (Fig. 2B).

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