Sleepless Man Wins Army of Crickets in a Fight

As a wise man once said. Crickets.

Truly devious creatures of the night. No, seriously, they're nocturnal. As I've irritatingly suffered to find out.

TL;DR: My solution was light. I plopped down a garden light, and they went there like the idiots that they are.

They're loud

In my room with a half-open window, their sounds get to 60-70 decibels. For context, my laptop's speaker (singular) playing music at full volume does just about as much when measuring right near the speaker (according to an app on my phone*). It's not painfully or dangerously loud, just the kind of sound that gets into your skull and sets up a drum circle when you're trying to peacefully descend into blissful slumber.

One solution would be to stay up till about 4-5 AM until the summer ends, because that's when they stop chirping, but you might find some issues with that solution.

How did I get rid of them?

Well, apparently just like a lot of bugs, they're attracted to light. I'm not exactly sure why. It's either due to them using it for navigation, or because they might associate light with prey, like glowing insects, probably both.

So I plopped a garden light somewhere far away from my window. Worked like a charm.

Now the sound is still there, but it's distant and more than comfy enough for me. A few of my family members confirmed when walking at night all the crickets were gathered there too.

Ta-da!

Also, warning: Cricket math

Why do they even cricket?

Apparently it's their mating call, and the louder it is, the more they stand out, thus the annoying sounds.

Dolbear’s Law

Apparently, they chirp more as the temperature raises. And there's even Dolbear’s Law which is a way to estimate temperature by counting the chirps. And that sounds interesting, so I tried it.

The formula is pretty simple, based on the number of chirps in 60 seconds we get the temperature in Fahrenheit.

T_{F} = 50 + \frac{Number of chirps in 60 seconds - 40}{4}

There's also a simplified formula, which is just:

T_{F} = 40 + Number of chirps in 15 seconds

So I counted. I don't actually know if my crickets are even the correct kind of cricket for this, and I'm not going out of my way to catch a poor cricket just to do some experiments on one, of course proven enough benefit I could ( •̀ω •́ ).

So, situation, I have lots of crickets, and you're supposed to isolate a single cricket. Well, if you listen to them for long enough, you start to notice they kinda have a "voice". I identified 3 separate crickets in the vicinity of my window right now, it's really hard to be sure tho.

And I decided to use the 15 second formula because suffering. This and my counting are in no way scientific, but when was counting the amount of cricket chirps scientific anyway? Well, I guess it must've been if this law exists.

To count them up, I took my microphone, a pencil and Audacity. Then I hit my table with the pencil for every chirp I can hear. It ended up more or less rhythmic, not sure if that's a good thing.

Pencil hitting waveform — Each bump is a hit

I would just take a microphone somewhere near a cricket and count it up in post, but none of my microphones were picking it up at all. It's all just static and wind or something. Which is fair enough, these are not exactly meant for crickets, they're meant for human voices.

The counting yielded 86 chirps that I divided by the number of crickets: $86 / 3 \approx 28.6 \approx 29$ chirps, plug that into the formula, $40 + 29 = 69 °$ Fahrenheit (coincidental funny number), convert that from freedom units, and we get 20.5° Celsius. According to my weather app it's 20° Celsius right now.

Spot on? Haaaa??

I think I just got lucky tho. But I did try this on two separate evenings, and in both cases if we divide the number of chirps by 3, we get an accurate result. I'm not sure if it's my judgment about the number of crickets, or I just got the formula for my specific kind and number of crickets right, somehow. But confusingly, yes, this works.

I do think that here in Vinnytsia, Ukraine we probably have some kinda different species than Dolbear after whom the law was named. And I'm just feeling like I'm tripping getting such accurate results from crickets, the first evening I counted it manually, and it was 21° (also spot on).

To really figure out, whether I'm tripping or not and my newfound self-trust issues, I could do like a month-long study on crickets, measuring them every day. But in addition to me being lazy, that kind of defeats the purpose, like I imagine myself stuck in a forest trying to figure out what season it is and counting crickets out of desperation, not doing a field study.

The formula for my crickets seems to be something like:

T_{F} = 40 + \frac{Number of chirps in 15 seconds}{3}

This is, however, from my very limited dataset of a few samples in two consecutive nights.

Vinnytsia's unofficial cricket-based temperature system is now open for licensing inquiries, contact here.

In the end

Chirpers deterred.

It worked. I sleep. They chirp ... somewhere else. Perfection.