Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/79

 suggesting a camel browsing on the leaves of a tree. He sparingly eats leaves of oak and maple supplied to him in his cage, but appears to prefer fresh fruit and grapes, and relishes bread soaked in water. He drinks rather less than most orthopterons.

When the katydids are singing at night in the woods they appear to be most wary of disturbance, and often the voice of a person approaching or a crackle underfoot is sufficient to quiet a singer far overhead. The male in the cage never utters a note until he bas been in darkness and quiet for a considerable time. But when he seems to be assured of solitude he starts his music, a sound of tremendous volume in a room, the tones incredibly harsh and rasping at close range, lacking entirely that melody they acquire with space and distance. It is only by extreme caution that the performer may be approached while singing, and even then the brief flash of a light is usually enough to silence those stentorian notes. Yet occasionally a glimpse may be had of the musician as he plays, most frequently standing head downward, the body braced rather stiffly on the legs, the front wings only slightly elevated, the tips of the hind wings projecting a little from between them, the abdomen depressed and breathing strongly, the long antennal threads waving about in all directions. Each syllable appears to be produced by a separate series of vibrations made by a rapid shuffling of the wings, the middle one being more hurried and the last more conclusively stressed, thus producing the sound so suggestive of ka-ty-did′, ka-ty-did′, which is repeated regularly about sixty times a minute on warm nights. Usually at the start, and often for some time, only two notes are uttered, ka-ty, as if the player bas diffîculty in falling at once into the full swing of ka-ty-did.

The structure of the wings and the details of the stridulating parts are shown in Figure 26. The wings (A, B) fold vertically against the sides of the body, but their inner basal parts form wide, stiff, horizontal, triangular flaps that overlap, the left on top of the right. A thick, sunken,