[00:00] There's a story that I've been trying to tell for a very, very long time, and I tried to tell it back in Peru in 2012, and I failed. Today, we're going to tell that story, but we got to go back to Peru first.
[00:13] Stop and listen for a second. If you live anywhere but Antarctica, you have those near you. I happen to know an entomologist. His name is Phil Torres.
[00:29] And Phil is going to explain to us what exactly is causing that noise. There's one part that is called the tymbal.
[00:41] So this is where it's like the top of a snapple bottle. However, what's really cool about these guys is this bottom part of its body is actually hollow, and that serves as a resonance chamber.
[00:55] So what we're going to try to get on the high speed is to see how fast it is [D] Sweet. So I've got the high speed set up at 3,000 Jeff is the photo tour guide here at Rainforest Expeditions.
[01:12] in the right spot for a long time, and we never could quite get the shot. frame rate or if we just didn't know where to look on the cicadas. I think that thing's opening and shutting in less than a millisecond.
[01:26] It actually ended up being six milliseconds, but more about that later. I want you to understand the reality of cicadas in Alabama right now. As you've probably heard by now, there's two different broods of cicadas.
[01:38] Some pop out after 13 years, some pop out after 17 years. I think we have the 13-year brood here in Alabama, or both, I don't know. You'll be driving down the road and a cicada will just land on your
[01:53] windshield wiper and hitch your ride, in this case, for five miles, I went to one of my favorite restaurants the other day. The people that own the restaurant, they keep a very tidy restaurant.
[02:07] It's just going to happen. They're like ants now. Just everywhere.
[02:20] look at all the holes in the ground where they've been coming up. Oh, my goodness.
[02:32] What tree is this? It's a cicada tree. I guess they're called shells, but look at this.
[02:46] It's inches thick. That is a lot cicadas.
[03:00] are the result of the cicadas, which have been living underground for years and years and years, depending on what brood it is, 13 or 17 years. They've been living underground, sucking sap and nutrients off of tree roots.
[03:15] and then they go, they hang on a tree, they shed their exoskeleton, And what we've been trying to show here, we were trying to show what's making the noise, like what part of the cicada is
[03:34] Now, the fact that this camera couldn't show it is a significant thing because this goes thousands of frames per second. telling the story with this camera, which can go 100,000 frames per second.
[03:51] and I have misplaced the one I had here, so we have to go cicada hunting. [G] It's overwhelmingly. [D] We have to do it.
[04:05] It's 2024. My understanding is only one brood is here in Alabama. [G] I don't remember it being this loud.
[04:19] We're going to get out of the truck and just let you hear this. We're on a wildlife refuge, which is why I can film and drive. There's two sounds, right?
[04:34] [G] Yeah, there's a high pitch clicking. [D] Yes. [G] And then somehow underneath it, there's this low thing that I describe as when a subway train is pulling into a station before it gets there,
[04:46] [D] It's like the slipping of the metal wheels on the track. [G] I've been trying to think of what is that sound, and that's exactly it.
[04:58] This might be a wildlife refuge, guy. How's it going? [M] Hey. [D] I'm making a video. Is that okay?
[05:13] [M] Oh, okay. What's it? [T] Tyler. [D] Tyler. [T] Us Fish and Wildlife Service. [D] So you're interns?
[05:25] [M] They're loud. of cicadas that are not hatching but coming up. but I think they're all coming up around the same area at the same exact time.
[05:40] That's what I think anyway. [T] Deep into the wood, yeah. [D] Really? [M] We've noticed on outside edges, you would think if you go into them,
[05:52] [D] Can you write us a cicada permit so we can go cicada hunting on you? and it tells you the decibel level, and you can do all sorts of things.
[06:06] I think that top band, the high band, is the high pitch one. [D] The subway car sound? [G] The subway car sounds. So if we let it rip for a second.
[06:22] What I want to know is what causes the top one? Is there two different animals doing one male and one female? Is there a call and response, or is it just two different creatures?
[06:37] Is it one creature making the two different noises at once? And one of the smartest people I know when it comes to sound is Gordon Mcgladdery. To top it all off, the first time I ever
[06:54] collaborated with Gordon, he wrote a song called Cicadas Waltz, which actually incorporates generated the sounds of cicadas into the song. blowing up, and Gordon made a song for that video.
[07:08] He does all the audio and the music you're going to hear later in this episode. [G] I did. [D] Can you open that, please? [D] Out in the field, we saw two frequencies, and I want to show it to you.
[07:22] What is this? [G] This is a spectrum analyzer. [George from audio recording] I wish I knew what frequency that was. [D] All right, so can you show us what's going on over here to the left?
[07:36] One is between 1,000 and 1,200 hertz, and then the other is roughly 3, 000 to 9,000 or 10,000 hertz.
[07:50] If we listen to them separately. [D] So that's what George says sounds like a subway car to him. [G] Yeah, it's cool. The other one is, I think,
[08:04] the one that most of us would recognize is like, yeah, that's cicadas. What's the street car sound and thing? [G] My guess is that these are not two separate insects.
[08:17] animals, but we can see that they are both happening all the way across. My second guess is that the cicada is resonating in two frequency bands, which is interesting because that requires two sets of vibration of some kind.
[08:35] [D] Using the information we got yards away from the Tennessee River, and we found the mother load of cicadas.
[08:50] Why do we not have a net? [D] Oh, they're doing it. Oh, dude, can I see that? [G] Yeah, do it.
[09:03] Look at this. They're mating. What are you doing under there?
[09:19] [G] Well, two cicadas love each other very much. If these things come out every so many years, then what happens?
[09:33] Do they plant eggs? They're connected, dude. [D] Got one. [D] Get in there. Get in there.
[09:46] [D] We've got four cicadas. [G] I think we got to go do slow-mo before we lose the sun.
[09:58] than expected, so we rushed back to try to beat the sun in order to get at least one slow-mo shot before the end of the day. All right, we're going to see something.
[10:13] You can see it moving, yeah. Oh, dude, we're going to see it. So that's the tymbal. This is 25,000 frames per second.
[10:30] [Both] Ohhh!!! [Destin laughs]
[10:42] [D] Okay, the bad news is I found a 10-year-old jar of jelly in my fridge. of lid I need because it's the same type of lid that was on this jar of jalapenos.
[10:58] When you click this thing like this, it's pretty loud. I don't know if you can hear that, it's a lot louder.
[11:10] It's hollow on the end there. it is resonating in the abdomen down below, which I think is fascinating.
[11:23] imagine if we had a can like this and we had one on one side and one on the other. But it's not just louder because there's two tymbals.
[11:36] I've read some papers and they all have very interesting things to say. It looks like because you have a tymbal on each side of the hollow cavity abdomen, that it's something called constructive interference, which is interesting.
[11:49] Now, the cool thing about the cicada right here is if you look at a cross-section of the hollow abdomen, you've got a tymbal over here, you've got a tymbal over here. So that acts like the two cans like this, only they're not popping like this.
[12:02] whatever we're going to figure out on the high speed. So when they're producing sound, they're being pulled by muscles like this. at exactly the same time, you can create a sound wave from each
[12:18] at the same time, and they hit and add together and you get a much louder sound. And the thing that's really interesting to me is it's not a click. was expecting, there seems to be a lot more going on than just one simple click.
[12:37] [G] I know that- [D] Look at it. Okay, there he goes. If we knew the frequency of the sound, we could calculate the...
[12:50] from a gas station and we went cicada hunting again. They should be able to go in there without getting cooked. We got to transfer our most important message to this, I think.
[13:07] [G] You get it? [D] Yeah. [Destin laughing and giggling] That was nice. That was backhand.
[13:23] That was impressive. After we collected all of our cicadas We remembered not to eat them, and then we headed back to set up the slow-mo.
[13:38] This time, we were going to try a shot at 99,000 frames per second. [D] Yeah, we got it.
[14:25] Then we ramped it up to 110,000 frames per second.
[14:54] a sequence, if you realign it so that you can compare three different ones, controlling the tymbal is
[15:06] different on different strokes.
[15:26] really close at really high speed, so we switched from the 100 millimeter macro to a 65 MPE, which is basically a lens with a built-in macro extension tube.
[16:43] [G] It's pulling and it's getting each one of these strands, essentially. [D] Pull vibrate, pull vibrate, pull vibrate
[16:57] [G] But I think it has to overcome the force of each of the mechanical So then that's what each one it goes. [D] I'm imagining an arch, and you have to buckle each arch.
[17:11] And it's easier to buckle a longer arch than it is to buckle a shorter arch. pulling in, it's like a progressive buckling.
[17:29] A direct approach to progressive buckling design. In case buckling occurs due to progressively increase...
[17:44] [G] Progressive buckling. [G] We are, but somebody else has used them. [Destin Laughs] [G] In a scientific [D] In a scientific paper.
[17:58] but it's not obvious how this is translating into sound. [G] It looks like it's caving in. [G] One, two, three.
[18:14] One, two, three. so it's three, four time or triplets, however you want to map it out. It's like you've got all these striations
[18:29] or these pleats, and they're buckling progressively as it goes up, right? So it's like, buckle, wobble, wobble, buckle, wobble, wobble, and that happens all the way up, and then the whole thing resets.
[18:43] We have this mechanical device that's doing multiple actions, My guess are that the wobbles correlate to the higher frequencies
[18:55] on the spectrogram, and the buckling, the progressive buckling, is the subway sound. so I don't want to come down definitively until I've had time to do a detailed
[19:07] time analysis and measure the delay of each mechanical action. Furthermore, as millions of cicadas interact in and out of phase in a small I think it's so cool that years ago,
[19:20] Gordon wrote a song called Cicada's Waltz without us realizing that the mechanical tymbal of a cicada works on the same time beats as a waltz. [soft guitar music starts]
[19:57] We have all of these cicadas left that we can't eat. incorporates the sponsor for today's video. we would love for you to incorporate our products into your video in some way.
[20:11] I don't think they were thinking beauty shots with cicadas. I'll tell you about Ridge as these cicadas are flying away.
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[21:42] I have asked them if they would throw in an AirTag money clip because I think Ridge is only doing this for Smarter Every Day. when you spend at least 76 bucks, which is the cost of a wallet,
[21:56] If you want the free AirTag money clip, just add it to your cart, and then at checkout, use the promo code smarter, and it'll take that cost away. That lets them know that you came from this video, which hopefully would
[22:10] So you'd be doing me a solid. I genuinely believe that so If you're an academic and you think this
[22:23] I would love to communicate about The thing I haven't seen described So, yeah, reach out. Let's write something up.
[22:37] of Smatter Every Day seem to be happy with the fact that they were able Thank you for supporting on Patreon.
[22:49] You can download that really cool photo. Patreon.com/smartereveryday If not, no big deal. I'm Destin.
[23:06] Have a good one. Bye.