Treehoppers are so cool! There’s so many different species of them, and they’ve got some really unique different looks. They communicate by vibrating the plants they are on, and the vibrations sound awesome when converted to sounds. We had a post on the Digital Bioacoustics community a while back for anyone who wants to hear what they sound like.
Thanks so much for the recommendation! I really enjoyed reading this. Here is a copy of my comment that I posted over there:
What a fascinating read! I really appreciate you sharing it. Ed Yong has a great book, An Immense World, all about various types of animal senses, and in the chapter on sound, he talks about this very owl. I was surprised when reading your post that it was Roger Payne’s work, but upon reviewing the chapter in An Immense World I saw that it was, in fact, him. I am familiar with Payne from his work with whales, many people credit him and his work with humpback whales songs as the reason that neatly the whole world has stopped whaling. With good reason, he produced an album of whale songs that changed the way the world saw them.
Ed Yong’s book is incredible, and I highly recommend it, he goes into detail about the senses we are generally acustomed to, but also some more uncommon ones like electro-reception. Here are a couple interesting bits from the section where he writes about the remarkable hearing of owls.
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So generally, an animal’s hearing pretty much overlaps with the frequencies of sound that it makes, but in this case it is an advantage to not be tuned to the frequency that the owl’s own features makes. I believe it was elsewhere in this same book where Ed Yong talks about a bird that is unable to hear it’s own song, the thought being that this particular bird’s insect prey was able to hear the sound and this somehow aided in hunting. I don’t remember the specifics, and if memory serves, it’s not entirely known why it would be like this.
The chapter goes on to mention that barn owl’s are not even the animal with the best hearing like this. There is a fly that is specifically tuned to the sound of male crickets:
He says that the Ormia can detect the position of a cricket to 1 degree. The Ormia is so efficient that it has actually led to some male crickets evolving out of using mating songs and leaving the females of the species to have to find males just by stumbling across them.