Two years ago, on Digital Journal, Michael Thomas reported on a smartphone app called Cicada Hunt, designed to identify several different insect species based on their cries. The idea behind the invention was to allow citizen scientists to search for a presumed population of Cicadetta montana, an endangered species in the U.K. and most of Europe, within the depths of the New Forrest.
C. montana is a species of Cicadetta, a rare winged insect. Males and females produce different sounds. The males produce shrill, buzzing calls, via rapidly flexing drumhead-like membranes (at 14 kHz.) In contrast, the females produce a series of clicks. Over history, the sounds of the males has been revered by some cultures. When spotted, the insects are said to be quite a sight: with large, transparent wings; a body that is dark slate-grey together with segments of the abdomen ringed with gold; and the legs are marked with orange striations.
The hunt for the insects in the U.K. has been going on for two years. One recent detection appeared to have located the sound of the mysterious insect. University of Oxford computer scientist Alex Rogers reported an alert, via a monitoring system, to his phone. His smartphone app has identified the sound as that of a cicada from within the New Forrest. This took the form of a distinctive sonogram, identified by the app’s software. However, having searched the area, Dr. Rogers now thinks the sound is most likely that of Roesel’s bush-cricket. The song of the cricket consists of continuous buzzing, at a fairly high pitch.
Despite this set-back, some 3,000 citizen scientists to date have downloaded the app and use this when wandering through the most likely habitat for C. montana — the New Forrest. The New Forest is an area of southern England, made up of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, heathland and forest. It is some 150 square miles in size.
Speaking with BBC Science, Dr. Rogers is undeterred. Speaking about the app, he said: “Every five seconds, [the device] wakes up, listens, does some analysis on the sound and makes a decision, ‘OK does that sound like it could be a cicada?’, and if it does it can then make a recording onto an SD card.”
Based on the habitat and steady environmental conditions, Dr. Rogers and a host of citizen scientists believe cicada to be somewhere within the depths of the forest. The hunt continues.
