From KCRW, this is Nachter.

From KCRW, this is NachTern. There's over 3,500 crickets I think like 7,000 Katie did all over the world.

Every habitat is covered by these insects.

You know, you find them in the desert, you find them in the trees,

you find them in wetlands, and if they're supposed to be there

and you don't hear them you wonder why.

And when I do hear them it's ah, things are as they should be.

They're great environmental indicators.

If you don't hear them where they're supposed to be, something could be

gone wrong in that area. So Katie Dids tend to have leaf-like appearances. Crickets, they're darker.

And I sometimes put it in a Tolkien sense,

whereas the Katie Dids are the elves

and the crickets are the dwarves, because the dwarfs were underground and you know

in the mines and all that and the elves are up in the trees like you know the like Katie did's but there are

tree crickets too that are up in the trees and they're just as delicate and they sing.

We all hear their songs.

You can actually identify the different species by their individual calls that are unique to that species.

All of them, whether a cricket or a kady did, they call by rubbing their wings together.

And it's called stridulation.

And it's very similar to getting your thumbnail and just sort of scraping it down along the

teeth of a comb.

So they have these two structures under their wings called the scraper and the file and when they rub together they make a sound

...