Claim: Outdoor temperature can be determined by counting the chirps made by crickets.
Status: True.
Origins: Crickets chirp by rubbing their wings or legs over each other. Yet it is only the males of the species that make this noise — they do so to attract mates. Therefore, when you're happily listening to the soothing sound of crickets chirping, you're actually eavesdropping on a courting ritual meant to warn off other lust-filled male crickets and to draw interested females to the ones doing the
serenading.
The notion that counting the chirps of crickets can serve as an informal way of working out the temperature is not new — in 1897, physicist Amos Dolbear proposed the reverse of that idea, stating outdoor temperature determined the number of cricket calls one would hear. Over the years, his way of looking at this relationship was turned around — people now count the chirps to get the temp rather than consult the thermometer to figure out how many cricket calls they will hear.
We've encountered a variety of "cricket chirp thermometer formulas" over the years. One specifies counting the chirps over a
The formula endorsed by The Old Farmer's Almanac seems the most reliable. Says that esteemed tome:
Example: 30 chirps + 40 = 70° F To convert cricket chirps to degrees Celsius, count number of chirps in Example: 48 chirps ÷ 3 + 4 = 20° C
To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in
Dr. Peggy LeMone of The GLOBE Program (a science education program funded by NASA, NOAA, NSF, and others) studied the theory during the summer of 2007 at her home in Boulder, Colorado, and posted her findings to her blog on
Now, granted, this mode of determining the temperature will work only when there are crickets about. Also, it's accurate only down to
Barbara "cold shouldered" Mikkelson
Last updated: 3 December 2007
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