Cricket Behavior: Observing Insects To Learn About Science & Scientific Inquiry

As biology teachers, we know how important it is for us and for our students to engage first-hand with nature. Ideally, bringing students to fields, woodlands, and wetlands to observe, explore, and wonder is the best way to stimulate curiosity and practice scientific inquiry. However, for many reasons, field excursions are not always practical or possible. When they are not, it is often effective to bring familiar living organisms into the classroom: Placing students in a context that makes the familiar strange. By highlighting intriguing questions about the natural world with which they are familiar, but mostly take for granted, it is possible to stimulate curiosity and awe. For example, we can study insect flight for aerodynamic design, termite mounds for their air conditioning systems, and dragonflies for their unique flight behaviors. Organisms like mice, snakes, fish, and insects make some of the best study subjects because their behavior is observable and relatively easy to understand. Discussions invariably extend well beyond the study organisms to big-picture topics like evolution, adaptation, and ecological relationships among organisms. Students have probably already informally observed some behavior of the patterns of crickets and they may have already wondered about the romantic sounds they make during the night. Although they may have listened to crickets, they probably have never actually watched them "sing. " In the classroom, where these insects can be conveniently observed, students can take time to carefully notice in new ways how crickets behave. I have found that students will delight in the surprising minute details of how these little animals move and interact with each other. Small changes in postures, appendage movements, song variations, feeding behavior, range of movements, and interactions between individual crickets begin to complicate what students think they know. Soon, discussions include intellectual attempts to relate what they see and hear to broader evolutionary and ecological questions. Students can learn to test ideas and ways to conceptualize why these creatures might behave the way they do. Through these processes, students learn not only a lot about these particular insects but they also learn about scientific reasoning and habits of mind as they practice original scientific inquiry as described in the National Standards (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996). These propensities, attitudes, actions, and the related scientific habits of mind that are involved in designing and carrying out original experiments are too often lacking in American classrooms. However, the lessons learned are vital to scientific literacy as described in the National Standards. The cricket behavior investigations and experiments explained here are adaptations of classic experiments that I used every fall to introduce my students to biology (adapted originally from Alexander, 1961). Please also see Dingle (1975a,1975b) as well as the recent work of Cade and Cade (2007) and articles published in this journal (i.e., Whiteley et al., 2007). They require very little equipment and can be used in any school setting from grades 5-12. Although this study takes no sophisticated equipment, it does take some imagination, ingenuity, and class time. In the beginning, it takes several class sessions to set up the original experiments and model the kinds of inquiry students later do independently. After the original class sessions, students need several 10-15 minute observation sessions and at least one whole class session (for debriefing and discussion) per week during these activities. I found that the relatively large, common black crickets of the genus Gryllus work well because they are active, relatively large, quite territorial, and display easily-observed social behaviors. Although it is far better to use wild-caught crickets, I have also used Acheta domesticus, the brown cricket available at pet stores and bait shops. …