Cricket Tell You the Temperature!

• The number of times some crickets chirp each second can be used to estimate temperature.
• Crickets, like all living things, have many chemical reactions going on inside their bodies, such as reactions that allow muscles to contract to produce chirping.
• Crickets, like all insects, are cold-blooded and take on the temperature of their surroundings.
• This affects how quickly these chemical muscle reactions can occur.
• Specifically, a formula called the Arrhenius equation describes the activation, or threshold, energy required to make these reactions occur.
• As the temperature rises, it becomes easier to reach a certain activation energy, thereby allowing chemical reactions, such as the ones that allow a cricket to chirp, to occur more rapidly.
• Conversely, as the temperature falls, the reaction rates slow, causing the chirping to diminish along with it.