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Katydids and Crickets - ThermometerMusic; Ambience: Snowy Tree Cricket hot, warm, and cold JM: Wondering how warm it is outside? Well, listen up. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Tom Walker is an entomologist at the University of Florida. He says that if you pay attention to the songs of crickets and katydids you can actually 'hear' the temperature.TW: "The songs of crickets and katydids get slower at lower temperatures and they get faster at higher temperatures. Crickets and katydids don't maintain a constant body temperature. Their temperature essentially takes on whatever the environmental temperature is, and, it happens, the nerves and muscles have chemistry that is slower at cold temperatures than at warm temperatures. So, things go slow at low temperatures and fast at high temperatures. I have a snowy tree cricket and I'll play a song of a warm one, a hot one, and a cold one. And so we'll start off with the warm one. (Plays song) So here's a hot one. (Plays song) And finally here's the cold one. (Plays song)TW: The snowy tree cricket sometimes called the thermometer cricket because it has a very predictable chirp rate relative to temperature. It's a very simple sort of relationship. For instance, if you count the number of chirps in 13 seconds and add 41 you get the Fahrenheit temperature - if you're in the eastern United States. On the West Coast the snowy tree cricket sings a little faster and there you count the number of chirps in 12 seconds and add 38. But, there's another snowy tree cricket on the West Coast, which is called Riley's Tree Cricket, and that one's quite slow, so you count the number of chirps in 21 seconds, and then add 38."JM: Please visit our website and check out our new blog. That's at pulseplanet, one word, pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.