2. Katydids - All Night Long

The Essay celebrates the musicality of Earth’s insect singers. 2. Katydids - All Night Long.

Naturalist and sound recordist Wil Hershberger hunts the sounds and songs of a multitude of North America's stridulating wonders for his ever-expanding website Songs of Insects. "Creating some kind of a sound was perhaps the best and only way for these species to communicate over long distances. And I'm sure it started out with some kind of incidental sound, tapping a body part against some hard surface, whatever it was. It finally evolved into this gorgeous, complex system that they use now, the richness of all of these different insects and their different songs. It's probably the first song of the planet Earth. And it's one of those things that gives you goosebumps, that this sound has lasted for hundreds of millions of years and still continues today."

Entomologist Charlie Woodrow, based at the University of Lincoln, journeys deep into tropical rain forests with head torch & ultrasound recording device in search of Spiny Devil Katydids or the elusive Supersonus. Some are almost invisible; many project their love songs into sonic reaches way beyond human hearing. "They are the most acoustically diverse group of organisms on the planet, in terms of just the pitch of sound alone. They vary from around 600 hertz, so a very low pitch kind of, kind of the frequency of communication for for human language, up to the most ultrasonic insect sounds in nature."

As told to producer Mark Burman

All Katydid recordings courtesy of Wil Hershberger, Lisa Rainsong ,Charlie Woodrow and the 'lost songs project'. Additional nightscapes recorded by Elliot Lang and George Vlad.
https://songsofinsects.com/identification-basics

A Storyscape Production for BBC Radio 3