Actual Clickbait - Smarter Every Day 299

NO CICADAS WERE EATEN IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS VIDEO. Do you think all the frequencies are happening on this one mechanical device, or do you think there are multiple animals making the call at different frequencies? I'm leaning towards the wobbles being the higher pitch sounds, and the "progressive buckling" being the lower pitch sound.. I think it would be SO cool to partner up with someone and write a paper on this. On the Ridge Wallet.... I worked it out with Ridge so you can get a free airtag money clip on orders over $76. They were cool and said yes. If you enjoy yours half as much as I enjoy mine it's worth it. Here's that link: www.ridge.com/smarter ! Thanks for considering supporting the sponsor!

I love how every Smarter Every Day video starts with: "Hey it's me Destin. I've been working on this video for 12-years."

I love how you refuse to acknowledge the increasing number of cicadas crawling on you as the video progresses. That's a great gag that needs to be applauded.

Me yelling "DESTIN THE CICADA IS ON YOUR SHIRT" like a toddler watching Dora.

This is the best kind of videos : curiosity, scientific approach, talking to people. You can tell that this is a work of art (heart) as much as it is science and science communication.

“We borrowed a net from a gas station and went cicada hunting again” is about the most Alabama sentence I’ve ever heard. 😂

There is so much amazing research-grade footage in this video! My favorite is 21:28

I like how a cicada lands on Destin's windshield wiper and his response is to check his odometer and say "alright little guy, let's see what you've got"

SmarterEveryDay, Veritasium, and Numberphile/Computerphile. The holy trinity of educational Youtubers. I'm sure I'm missing a few other great ones as well.

The tymbal reminded me of plastic bendy straws, and it behaved the same way when you press it down the middle and unpop it by folding. It's insane how a simple mechanism is so effective.

I love the fact that a cicada is clinging to your shirt.

Ohhh now i get the pun in the title. „Clickbait“ is literally genius👍

Don't know if you will see this Destin but i found out 2 hours ago as of the time of writing this comment that my grandfather passed away. my father came over so i wouldn't be alone with the shocking news. my grandfather was a better dad to my father than his own was so the pain is deep. we ended up watching this video as we both are very science minded and your videos have always fascinated us in the past and have enjoyed them for years. it gave us some comfort. though i have a lot of grief to get through and healing to start, i wanted to say thank you for all you do and in my time of need you gave comfort to a hurting man. thank you.

3:51 "I misplaced the one I had here so we need to go cicada hunting" me, who's been staring at his shirt for a whole minute: yeah I wonder where it went

Bioacoustician here (professional animal eavesdropper), not a cicada researcher you were looking for though. This is lovely, so glad we’re getting nerdy about sound production and animal communication! Fun stuff to note, cicadas are not the only species producing multiple sounds or bands on a spectrogram. You saw this in your spectrogram too with human voice, we put a lot of info in those harmonics! Wild guess based on your footage, but I suspect with cicadas this is a sequential not simultaneously sound. Possibly one frequency is from the initial snap of the tymbal, and one from a resonance band from the wobble, body cavity or environment. I suspect the during chorusing it gets blended to two continuous bands, rather than sequential sounds. Birds on the other hand can create two simultaneously fundamental frequencies (primary sound not echo or resonance). This is due to independent control of the chambers of their syrinx (two independent voice boxes). Check out song sparrows on xenocanto or Macaulay library to see some ‘c’ shaped tracings (syllables) with multiple independent fundamental frequencies, ie two tones produced simultaneously from one animal. In theory with two sound producing tymbals, cicadas could and may do this too, just harder to catch on a spectrogram because I bet they are similar in frequency. Glad you’re staying curious about your world. 👍

Great, now he’s tricked us into admiring bugs.😂

Hypothesis: (please note, I'm not an entomologist, nor an acoustic engineer, merely a guy with a physics degree and too much time on his hands) 3 total tones (we don't see the bottom acknowledged in the spectrum analysis, but looking at the right side, it looks like it's around 100-200 Hz), whose causes are: • 100-200Hz: the sound of the tymbal fully closing hitting the abdomen upon closing (happens every ~6 ms, or ~167Hz) • 1000-1200Hz: the sound of the • 3kHz - 10kHz: the sound of the accordion-like structures being expanded during the reset of the tymbal (~15 folds per tymbal) • In this highest frequency band we see a fade toward ~15kHz, which would make sense considering the variance of size of the folds, and speed at which they contract. With some basic approximations for acoustic resonance with assumptions of a spherical thoracic cavity of r=0.33cm, we get a fundamental frequency around 16kHz. Considering the cicadas frequencies stop shy of this, I wonder what this would suggest about how resonance affects the thoracic cavity and the cicada as a whole. In fact, looking closer at the data at 7:22, we see that there are several "dark" zones in the relevant bands, particularly at ~8kHz, a bit below 5kHz, and potentially one around 800Hz. These seem to roughly match up to the subharmonics of a fundamental around 16kHz (the 1/2, 1/4, and 1/20 subharmonics, respecitvely). The 1/3 subharmonic looks like it may have some constructive interference, which puts me at a bit of a loss, however.

Hey, entomologist here!! Looking at a range map it looks like Alabama and Tennessee are experiencing the emergence of Brood XIX, one of the 13 year cicada broods. I believe that is the only species of periodical cicada you'll be seeing. HOWEVER y'all still have annual cicadas, and several species of those by the looks of it! So that could be factoring into the calls at the larger scale. Also, just an FYI only males have tymbals but both sexes do make noise. The females flick their wings in response, so that is a dynamic you might also be missing when analyzing the male's tymbal. Just letting you know that this video was so cool. I love your mechanical engineering videos but when you do deep dives on the physics of biology it's just extra mind-blowing to me (yes, I'm biased lol). I'm from Texas so we don't get periodical cicadas, but I happen to be doing some research work in the northwest for the summer! Unfortunately still not really in cicada territory but I'm going to make my way out somewhere that does! Please update us once you've done some more analysis because it's so fascinating to see you work through this! (Also, you CAN eat cicadas. I've never tried it but I hear fried they're good!)

2:35 "What kind of tree is it?" "A Cicada Tree" LMAO that's gold

This video is why I love your channel. I have literally wondered my whole life how they make that sound.