Squeaky wheel gets the grease!
When these ingenious insects rub their wings together to generate sound, they also engineer a biological contraption known as a ‘baffle,’ which increases its volume. They do this by cutting a neat hole near the centre of a leaf, adjusting themselves within the hole, and flapping their wings against the leaf surface, thereby using it as a megaphone. A group of scientists from the United Kingdom and India studied how these insects (male Oecanthus henryi) selected the leaves and cut the holes. The findings were published recently in the journal eLife.
