Taiwan Today

PHOTOS BY HUANG CHUNG-HSIN

The Singing Insects exhibition spotlights the many faces of acoustic insects and sends a message of biodiversity conservation.

The popularity of garments made of fabrics that protect the wearer from bugs for sale in outdoor equipment shops tells of most people’s attitude toward insects, though humans actually know very little about this most diversified group in the animal kingdom. By organizing the Singing Insects exhibition, the National Museum of Natural Science (NMNS) brings into focus various overlooked aspects of the insect world.

The exhibition opened in July and runs until November 29 at the NMNS in Taichung City, central Taiwan. Before checking out details of the show, many audience members are curious about the exhibition room itself. All the walls and exhibit cases are made of cardboard and clipped together, pictures are printed with eco-friendly ink and decorative giant bugs on display are made of paper. Yang Jung-shihn, an associate curator of the museum’s Exhibition Division and the show’s designer, says that it is probably the first exhibition room in Taiwan that has been built using all green materials. “For any natural science show, conservation is always the first message we want to send,” he says. “Using green materials to build the exhibition space is a good way of sending that message.” Yang adds that compared with wood, metal or plastics, cardboard and paper are not only more eco-friendly, but also easy to assemble, disassemble, ship and reassemble when the exhibition is over or traveling elsewhere.

Chan Mei-ling, an associate curator of entomology in the museum’s Zoology Department and organizer of the show, explains that the term “singing insect” is not a scientific classification, but a generally accepted term for some acoustic insects that can produce sounds that are “meaningful, rhythmic and audible to human ears.” On stepping into the exhibition room, visitors can immediately understand the “rhythmic and audible to human ears” part as they hear recordings of the insects “singing.” Then through various films, texts, charts, specimens and live samples, visitors get to learn that “meaningful” refers to sounds that are produced when the insect is threatened, looking for a mate or signaling danger. Different species have different ways of producing sounds, and the same species can produce a variety of sounds under different situations. The show provides an idea of the numbers of different insects, their distributions, life cycles, sounds, auditory systems and their roles across human cultures, and visitors can also try their hands at several interactive devices. They can, for example, try to compose their own music by mixing the sounds of different insects.

Sound of Silence

Some of the sounds heard in the showroom are not unfamiliar to local residents, but there is a lot that will be new to most visitors. And as the exhibition includes species from other parts of the globe, audiences can also explore singing insects they might not have heard of and learn about the roles these insects play in other cultures. Many visitors, for example, find it interesting that 90 percent of the male crickets of a specific species on Kauai in Hawaii lost their ability to chirp within two decades in order to survive the invasion of a species of fly that is a deadly cricket parasite. During the mating season, the mute crickets stay close to the chirping ones and ambush female crickets attracted by the chirping. What will happen when all of the male crickets become mute remains to be seen.

Another more “shocking” species to local audiences is the Madagascar hissing cockroach, which is one of the largest species of cockroach and reaches up to 10 centimeters at maturity. The cockroach, originally from the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa, hisses when it is disturbed or when challenged and about to fight another roach. It produces the sound by forcing air through the breathing pores on its abdomen. It is believed to be the only insect that can hiss in this manner, as most insects make a “hissing” sound by rubbing various body parts together. In the eyes of most audience members, roaches are one of the dirtiest and most disgusting creatures in existence. The wingless cockroach—much to their surprise—is a popular pet in some parts of the world because of its hissing sound, large size and interesting appearance. Fashion designers have even come up with the idea of decorating them with crystals to turn them into “walking pendants.”

While younger visitors to the exhibition might want to have one of these accessories crawling around, their parents are likely to be more interested in insects that remind them of the good old days. Cicadas, for example, are insects that kept many members of older generations entertained in their childhood. Back then children used long bamboo poles with paste or glue on the tip to catch cicadas high up in trees. The children would then keep the cicadas in cages and hang them outside their windows, listening to hear if their cicadas could “out-chirp” others. This is in fact a centuries-old game, with records of catching and caging cicadas by children reaching back to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220).

Sacred Cicadas

Many Chinese also regard cicadas as symbols of rebirth or immortality in much the same way as the Egyptians viewed the sacred scarab. The cicada’s periodic molting of its shell is compared with a person’s leaving the physical body behind at the time of death. Bronze vessels dating back to 1500 B.C. ornamented with cicadas have been found in Chinese tombs, along with pottery and jewelry featuring cicada designs. It has also been a custom to put a jade cicada in the mouth of the deceased out of belief in the insect’s power of reincarnation.

Some other “heavyweight” singing insects in Chinese culture are crickets and katydids. Cricket culture in China encompasses a 2,000-year history of both singing insects and fighting crickets. In the Tang dynasty (618–907), people started to keep crickets in cages and enjoy their songs while in captivity, and cricket fighting flourished as a popular sport under the Song dynasty (960–1279).

Katydids were kept as symbols of luck and auspicious virtue from the Chun Qui period (770–476 B.C.), but it was not until the beginning of the Tang dynasty that they were kept purely for the enjoyment of their song. When the autumn arrived, concubines who did not have anything better to do caught the insects and kept them in small golden cages, which were placed near the concubines’ pillows so that the “songs” could help those lonely women through the night.

While male katydids chirp to attract a mate, a male cricket may chirp to show that it is in a fighting mood. Historic references show that cricket fighting began in the Song dynasty and soon became a popular game or sport for adults and children. A court official named Jia Sidao (1213–1275), known as the Cricket Premier, wrote The Book of Crickets, which not only covers cricket diseases, cures, ways to use female specimens, food, medicine, brushes to tease the insect in order to provoke it to fight and other cricket “science” in great detail, but also includes philosophy and literature related to the bugs. It is one of few books to treat any organism in such a detailed manner and across such a wide variety of subjects and has long been considered the cricket bible for enthusiasts. Another famous character in Chinese history is Emperor Xuan (1427–1464) of the Ming dynasty. He was known as the Cricket Emperor and was so obsessed with cricket fighting that the insect became the primary tribute offered at the palace.

Historians, however, are not certain whether cricket fighting started among average people or the royal families. Whatever the case may be, the game became a fashionable activity for members of the upper classes to show off their wealth and status, while the lower classes placed emphasis on gambling. There were also differences between the bug houses or the cricket containers used by the different classes. Containers belonging to upper-class enthusiasts were usually made of jade, gold, ivory or other expensive materials, while those used by other classes were made of bamboo, gourds and clay. They could have detailed carvings, colorful glazes, or be just a simple box. Gourd-shaped containers were the most popular design and there were also “tube” containers crafted specifically for keeping small singing crickets in a pocket. The exquisite workmanship of some of the containers can still be seen in museums and private collections.

Cricket fighting has survived to this day and is still a serious “industry” in mainland China. An Internet search can easily find numerous cricket farms, cricket fighting clubs, reference materials, trainers and even fighting regulations. Early immigrants brought the game to Taiwan. Last year, for the sake of “cross-strait exchanges,” Taiwanese cricket farmer Xie Jue-an took 20 of his warriors to a Shanghai cricket-fighting match. However, there was not any actual engagement as the Taiwanese species, known as the black dragon, is twice as big as members of the Chinese species, which were smart enough to decide not to fight a losing battle.

Cricket fighting in Taiwan, however, is only popular in a small area in the southern part of the island, as local children have developed their own kind of pastime with the insects.

‘Pouring the Cricket’

Known as “pouring the cricket,” the most popular local game is to catch the crickets by pouring water into their nests to force them out. Since the nests have backdoors, “hunters” must first locate and seal them to avoid the escape of the prey. “The fun part is the hunting,” says entomologist Chan Mei-ling, who is an experienced hunter, “and as crickets taste good, the prey usually ends up as a snack for the children.”

In addition to their recreational contributions, some species of singing insects are used in traditional Chinese medicine. The empty shell shed by a specific species of cicada, for example, is used as part of the prescriptions to treat fever and associated seizures, skin rashes and eye disorders such as blurred vision. Modern medical science has found replacements for most of the traditional prescriptions using dead bugs, however.

Cross-Cultural Katydids

The tradition of keeping singing or fighting insects can be found in other cultures. The Japanese keep katydids as pets to appreciate their singing, and beetle fighting is a traditional form of entertainment in Thailand. Meanwhile, there are cases where a species of singing insect can have very different meanings in different cultures. Locusts, for example, are seen as a curse in some cultures since one of the plagues of Egypt in the Bible was a swarm of locusts, which ate all the country’s crops. But for the Thais, locusts are simply a good source of animal protein. Chan Mei-ling says that the Thai government bans the use of pesticides on crops to avoid “contaminating” the locusts, trading starch for animal protein. Locusts in Thailand are either deep-fried before showing up on a dinner table or canned for sale in supermarkets.

Some singing insects have also appeared in literary works, songs, movies or cartoons in different cultures, from The Ant and the Cricket in Aesop’s Fables, and the character of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio to the cricket in the movie The Last Emperor. Yet despite the many faces of singing insects presented in the exhibition, knowledge of insect songs pales in comparison to that of whales, birds or frogs. In fact, humans know very little about these six-legged creatures that represent about four-fifths of all the animal biodiversity on Earth.

Entomologist Chan Mei-ling notes that the number of insect species is estimated at between 6 and 10 million, with only about a million described. Although some individual species are currently classified as vulnerable, insects in general are incredibly adaptable and will probably survive as long as Earth can support life in any form. For various reasons, insects have received relatively little attention even from scientists, let alone conservationists. The NMNS is working to change that with the Singing Insects exhibition. As scientists are reminding us that the conservation of biological diversity is just as important as that of individual species, people are now becoming increasingly aware that the insect kingdom deserves far more attention and that they can hardly pretend to be conserving biodiversity if they ignore the biggest part of it.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw