Cricket Community Research Articles

Crickets as indicators of ecological succession in tropical systems, New Caledonia

AbstractCrickets (Ensifera, Grylloidea) are not commonly used as ecological indicators in contrary to other Orthoptera (e.g., grasshoppers and katydids). However, they are sensitive to environmental changes and abundant in tropical regions. To evaluate whether crickets are relevant bioindicators of tropical ecosystems, we investigated cricket assemblages along a tropical ecological gradient. We collected crickets during both day and night in southern New Caledonia for three stages of ecological succession: open shrubland, preforest, and forest. Simultaneously, we measured several environmental variables, such as temperature and relative humidity, at each sampling site. Cricket species assemblages showed a clear response to ecological succession. The highest and lowest species richness and abundances of individuals were, respectively, found in forest and shrubland, with species specialized in each ecological stage revealing the conservation value of each of these stages. Similar results were found when considering only the part of cricket communities with the ability to acoustically communicate. This work is part of a larger research program about Neocaledonian crickets and contributes to support the use of acoustic approaches to monitor tropical environments. In conclusion, these findings highlight the potential value of crickets as an environmental indicator in tropical ecosystems. The results also contribute to the discussion of the intrinsic conservational value of shrublands in New Caledonia and similar ecotypes.Abstract in French is available with online material.

Carabid activity-density and community composition, and their impact on seed predation in pulse crops

Reduced use of chemicals in weed management has been identified as a key strategy to increase overall agricultural sustainability. Carabid (Coleoptera: Carabidae) and cricket (Orthoptera:Gryllidae) weed seed predation has shown promise, but also variability, as an additional weed management tool. Therefore, it is important that carabid activity-density and weed seed predation is further explored in a wide variety of crops and cropping systems, including large conventional systems where sustainability gains may be the largest. Here we explored carabid and cricket activity-density, community, and weed seed consumption in commercial conventional pulse crop fields. Pulse crops are increasingly being incorporated in cropping rotations but weed seed predation is hardly explored in this group of crops. We sampled twenty-four large commercial lentil, pea, faba bean, and soybean fields, and found that crop type did not affect levels of seed predation or carabid activity-density but was a factor in shaping the carabid + cricket community. Crop history had an unexpectedly large impact on the community, fields previously planted to canola had relatively high Amara activity-densities. The carabid genera Amara and Pterostichus, as well as crickets were associated with volunteer canola seed predation. None of the studied carabid taxa, nor crickets, were a significant factor explaining kochia seed predation. We also explored the effects of crop canopy-driven microclimate factors on carabid and cricket activity-density and weed seed predation. The Amara, the most abundant granivorous taxon in this study, were positively related to soil temperatures but not to soil light intensity. Our study highlights the importance of cropping history on the community of beneficial insects in crop fields and indicates a taxon specific relationship with soil temperature and weed seed predation.

Support for LGBT diversity and inclusion in sport: a mixed methods study of Australian cricket

ABSTRACT Academic, policy and activist debates on how sport organizations can advance support for Lesbian, Gay, Bi and, Trans (LGBT) people at all levels of competition (from grassroots to elite) have risen to prominence in recent years. This paper explores the extent and nature of support for LGBT diversity in sport, with an empirical focus on cricket in Australia. Using a mixed method research design, the authors combine an online survey (n = 337) and semi-structured interviews (n = 17) across various levels of competition and administration. Drawing on Avery’s theory of support for diversity, the findings demonstrate a perceived lack of institutional support through endorsement and activism for LGBT diversity but noticeable support from the grassroots cricket community. The survey data show a perceived need for increased efforts to include LGBT communities in cricket. Stakeholder interviews demonstrate a lack of understanding and awareness of LGBT diversity amongst administration at both the community and leadership levels. We contend that if cricket in Australia is to truly be a “sport for all”, and policy imperatives around diversity and inclusion are to be achieved, clear and consistent institutional support showing both commitment and action towards LGBT diversity must be demonstrated.

HUBUNGAN POWER LENGAN DAN KOORDINASI MATA TANGAN TERHADAP AKURASI LEMPARAN BOWLING PADA ATLET CRICKET PUTRI KOTA BEKASI

Cricket is a sport that is played on a grassy field that leads to positive mental development and prioritizes honesty, fairness, honor / respect for others, accepts referee decisions, is polite and self-controlled. The cricket community at 45 Islamic University Bekasi is one of the places for student talent development in cricket, in this cricket sport has basic techniques including punches, catches, and throws. The method used in this research is the correlation research method. The result of this study is that there is a significant relationship between arm power and hand eye coordination on bowling accuracy both partially and simultaneously

Social Network Analysis of Cricket Community Using a Composite Distributed Framework: From Implementation Viewpoint

This paper proposes an alternate ranking system based on social network metrics and their evaluation in a composite distributed framework. The most important aspect of social network domain is voluminous data. In order to know key trends, predictive analysis of huge sets of raw data can be effective. Again these analytics are generally very compute-intensive. The most efficient solution of such compute-intensive analysis is to map such problems in a distributed domain. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the analysis of cricket community from the viewpoint of social network and finding ranking of players and countries based on the properties of graph centrality measures. Second, the paper proposes a comprehensive distributed framework to offer infrastructural support for the large data analysis as well as graph processing. Hadoop is an open-source framework to store and process large data sets in a cloud environment. MapReduce is a popular programming model for processing that data in a distributed manner. However, MapReduce alone is not efficient for graph processing. Giraph is an alternative programming paradigm for graph processing in Hadoop. Using a practical case study of social network analysis of cricket community, this paper captures the significance of the alternate ranking in this sport, as well as shows effectiveness of the proposed framework in the process of analyzing voluminous data.

Cricket calling communities as an indicator of the invasive ant Wasmannia auropunctata in an insular biodiversity hotspot

Invasive species are a major concern for the maintenance of ecosystem services and biodiversity but are difficult to mitigate. Upstream solutions to prevent their impact, including their detection, are needed. Wasmannia auropunctata, an invasive ant living in vagile supercolonies, is especially hard to track and is a major threat for tropical ecosystems and local animal communities. As part of such tropical communities, crickets are sensitive to ecological conditions, easy to collect, detectable and identifiable through their species-specific calls. Here, we evaluated the use of an acoustic community of crickets as an indicator of the presence of W. auropunctata in New Caledonia. We evaluated the dominance of the crickets in the soundscape, describe the cricket community structure and diversity along a shrubland to forest gradient, characterize these cricket communities structure and diversity in the light of ongoing invasion by W. auropunctata, and identify cricket species' indicators of the invasion. Acoustic recordings collected on 24 sites were described using human-listening and spectrographic visualization. The results demonstrated a clear dominance of the cricket group in the New Caledonian nocturnal soundscapes. Each habitat harbored a specific acoustic cricket community related to specific environmental attributes including vegetation height, daily variation of humidity and temperature. The presence of W. auropunctata was significantly associated with a lower cricket acoustic activity and species richness at night. Of the 19 species detected, four nocturnal species were identified as indicator of non-invaded forests and preforests. This work supports the use of acoustic as an alternative method to detect invasion.

Cloning colonialism: Residential development, transnational aspiration, and the complexities of postcolonial India

Within this article, we discuss/unpack a speculative international property development born out of a license agreement between the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and real estate investment company, Anglo Indian. The proposed building of twelve cloned, MCC branded, cricket communities in India–targeted to the consumption-based lifestyles of India’s new middle class–is addressed within the context relational to the political, economic, and cultural rationalities of postcolonial India, shifting power dynamics within the international cricket formation, and the associated re-colonisation of cricket-related spaces/bodies. Anglo Indian’s proposed communities are understood as part of a complex assemblage of national and global forces and relations (including, but certainly not restricted to): transnational gentrification; urban (re)development; and, revised understandings of historical and geographic connections between places, governance, and the politics of be(long)ing in branded spaces. This analysis explicates how Anglo Indian’s idealized community development offers a literal and figurative space for embodied performance of “glocal competence” for consumption-based identity projects of the new Indian middle-class (Brosius, 2010, p. 13) through the somewhat ironic mobilization of colonial spatial logics and cultural aesthetics.

Maintaining a Minority Sport: Cricket in Post-Colonial Hong Kong

Cricket was one of the main sports that typified British imperial cultural exports, but in the colony of Hong Kong it remained largely a pursuit with limited appeal beyond expatriates and South Asian residents. After 1997, the cricket community did receive better financial and administrative support, but a consistent policy to promote the sport was lacking. Hong Kong cricket officials have become increasingly aware of the need to extend the sport more effectively to the Chinese community and, ultimately, to mainland China itself. As Hong Kong and its citizens face increasingly contentious debates over individual and collective identity, this article considers the sociocultural challenges facing a sport whose historical development and current realities are steeped in colonial images.

Crickets (Insecta, Orthoptera, Grylloidea) from Southern New Caledonia, <br />with descriptions of new taxa

Intensive sampling of cricket communities has been undertaken in southern New Caledonia in selected plots of vegetation, i.e. rain forest, preforest and maquis shrubland. This leads to the discovery of many new taxa, which are described in the present paper, together with closely related species from nearby areas. Descriptions are based on general morphology and characters of genitalia. Calling songs are described for all acoustic taxa but two, and observations about species habitats are given. In total, 35 species belonging to 13 genera are studied, including 21 new species and two new genera. The pattern of assemblages of cricket species in New Caledonia is discussed.

Effects of hedgerows on bats and bush crickets at different spatial scales

Biodiversity is threatened by the loss and fragmentation of habitats. The role of hedgerows in maintaining biodiversity is well established, but few studies have addressed the importance for biodiversity of the intrinsic characteristics of hedgerows and the quality of hedgerow networks along a spatial scale. We examined three quality indices providing information at different territorial levels: density in the landscape, structural diversity and wood production. We performed an acoustic survey in a grassland to estimate the species abundance and community composition of bats (9 taxa) and bush crickets (11 species). Using an approach based on species and traits, we assessed how hedgerow quality influenced the activity of these taxa at different spatial scales (from 50 to 1000 m) and focused on three types of traits: bush cricket mobility ability, bat foraging strategy and habitat specialization. In general, our results showed the importance of hedgerow quality for bats and bush crickets, but the strength of the association between taxa and hedgerows varied substantially among the species and the spatial scales. Although it depends on the taxa, the production, density and structural diversity of hedgerows each had an overall positive effect. Our results suggested that these effects were generally more important at large scales. The scale effect of the production index is the best predictor of activity for bat and bush cricket taxa and traits. Our results showed the importance of hedgerow quality for the ecology of bat and bush cricket communities and could be used to improve conservation management.

Aggregation of Cricket Activity in Response to Resource Addition Increases Local Diversity.

Crickets are often found feeding on fallen fruits among forest litter. Fruits and other sugar-rich resources are not homogeneously distributed, nor are they always available. We therefore expect that crickets dwelling in forest litter have a limited supply of sugar-rich resource, and will perceive this and displace towards resource-supplemented sites. Here we evaluate how sugar availability affects cricket species richness and abundance in old-growth Atlantic forest by spraying sugarcane syrup on leaf litter, simulating increasing availability, and collecting crickets via pitfall trapping. We found an asymptotic positive association between resource addition and species richness, and an interaction between resource addition and species identity on cricket abundance, which indicates differential effects of resource addition among cricket species. Our results indicate that 12 of the 13 cricket species present in forest litter are maintained at low densities by resource scarcity; this highlights sugar-rich resource as a short-term driver of litter cricket community structure in tropical forests. When resource was experimentally increased, species richness increased due to behavioral displacement. We present evidence that the density of many species is limited by resource scarcity and, when resources are added, behavioral displacement promotes increased species packing and alters species composition. Further, our findings have technical applicability for increasing sampling efficiency of local cricket diversity in studies aiming to estimate species richness, but with no regard to local environmental drivers or species-abundance characteristics.

No phenotypic signature of acoustic competition in songs of a tropical cricket assemblage

Efficient acoustic communication in multispecies assemblages is challenging due to the presence of heterospecific signals. Masking interference and signal confusion of similarly structured signals can impose fitness costs and, thus, drive evolutionary processes that shape acoustic signals to reduce their overlap in signal space. Although the partitioning of signal space has been frequently studied in frog and bird communities, this topic has received much less attention with reference to insects that communicate acoustically. In this study, we examined the role of acoustic competition in a tropical cricket community and tested the following hypotheses: 1) cosignaling species are expected to exhibit more dissimilar calling songs as compared with species that are spatially and/or temporally separated and 2) species signaling with similar song frequencies, who are thereby subject to energetic masking, are more likely to differ in the temporal domain of their calling songs. Using non-metric multidimensional scaling and pairwise comparison methods to measure acoustic dissimilarity, we found no evidence for either hypothesis: the acoustic signals of species pairs that cosignaled or used similar calling frequencies did not significantly differ from those of species that were spatially/temporally segregated or had large song frequency differences. In conclusion, for the acoustically communicating cricket community investigated, no supportive evidence for the partitioning hypothesis and the widespread belief that acoustic competition has led to divergent selection pressures on signal structure to avoid masking interference was found. Instead, we argue that selection pressures on sensory/neuronal mechanisms seem to more strongly drive reliable communication.

Twenty20 as Media Event

We analyse Twenty20 cricket tournaments as media events, a particular social process with its own logic, function and effects. In Dayan and Katz's original formulation, media events enable a society to assemble, reflect on and legitimate its establishment institutions. Through a global mediatized event in space/time, Twenty20 creates a focal point for an international cricket community to watch, discuss and endorse or criticize the institutions and order of world cricket. Conceptions of the community and its order were present in statements made by different national teams as they approached the 2010 Twenty20 World Cup. We find that discussion engendered by the emergence of Twenty20 media events are structured around binaries of Test cricket, its techniques, sanctity and sporting values, against Twenty20, its ‘hit and giggle’ techniques, its innovations and its association with sporting values. Nevertheless, as all formats adapt and the institutional order evolves, we already find evidence of these binaries beginning to dissolve.

An “Economic” Ranking of Batters in Test Cricket*

There is much debate within the cricket community over the relative greatness of various batters. Attempts to guide this debate using statistical techniques have thus far been unsatisfying due to difficulties in determining appropriate trade-offs between certain performance criteria. By applying the concepts of opportunity cost and supernormal profit to batting performance we are able to produce a cardinal ranking system that uses non-arbitrary weightings to rank players. The proposed method is used to score past and current players and we find that the Australian batsman Sir Donald Bradman is the highest performer with India’s Sachin Tendulkar a close second. We also note that there is little public awareness of the greatest women batters and rank England’s Rachael Heyhoe-Flint and Australia’s Betty Wilson in the first two positions.

High background noise shapes selective auditory filters in a tropical cricket

SUMMARYBecause of call frequency overlap and masking interference, the airborne sound channel represents a limited resource for communication in a species-rich cricket community like the tropical rainforest. Here we studied the frequency tuning of an auditory neuron mediating phonotaxis in the rainforest cricket Paroecanthus podagrosus, suffering from strong competition, in comparison with the same homologous neuron in two species of European field crickets, where such competition does not exist. As predicted, the rainforest species exhibited a more selective tuning compared with the European counterparts. The filter reduced background nocturnal noise levels by 26 dB, compared with only 16 and 10 dB in the two European species. We also quantified the performance of the sensory filter under the different filter regimes by examining the representation of the species-specific amplitude modulation of the male calling song, when embedded in background noise. Again, the filter of the rainforest cricket performed significantly better in terms of representing this important signal parameter. The neuronal representation of the calling song pattern within receivers was maintained for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios because of the more sharply tuned sensory system and selective attention mechanisms. Finally, the rainforest cricket also showed an almost perfect match between the filter for sensitivity and the peripheral filter for directional hearing, in contrast to its European counterparts. We discuss the consequences of these adaptations for intraspecific acoustic communication and reproductive isolation between species.