ucsdhealthsciences: You Might Hear A Cricket Chirp Ormia...

ucsdhealthsciences:

You Might Hear A Cricket Chirp

Ormia ochracea is a tiny, parasitical fly and the bane of crickets. The fly listens for cricket chirps, homes in and deposits larvae on the back of the cricket’s back. The larvae then proceed to burrow into the cricket and eat it alive.

While this scenario is nothing for crickets to sing about, it’s absolute inspiration for researchers trying to develop the next generation of directional hearing aids, who describe a new, fly-inspired prototype in the journal Applied Physics Letters .

What’s particularly notable about the fly’s hearing abilities is that they derive from ears that are, well, extremely small. Human ability to detect the source and direction of sounds derives significantly from our large heads and widely separated ears. The latter receive the same sound at slightly different times. Our brains analyze that time difference and use it to locate the sound source.

The heads of flies, though, are just a millimeter or so wide, about the thickness of an average fingernail. (Incidentally, the fly above is resting on a fingernail so you can get a good sense of scale.) Flies overcome their size limitations by creatively tweaking the internal hearing structure. Between the two ears of a fly is a sort of see-saw that moves up and down, amplifying the incredibly small time differences of incoming sounds. It allows the fly to find chirping crickets quite well.

Researchers at the University of Texas have used the fly’s ear structure as a model to create minute pressure-sensitive devices out of silicon that they hope can eventually be used in new directional hearing aids that are smaller, more comfortable and longer-lasting.

via Tumblr http://ift.tt/1AzLAJd July 30, 2014 at 10:59PM