Abstract
Males of most of the mosquitoes and midges that mate in swarms (Downes 1969) are attracted over a short range by the sound of the female. The species that show this behaviour have two characters in common: firstly, the antennae of the males are plumose, with whorls of long fibrillae on their distal segments (Fig. la) and secondly, there is a marked difference between the sounds made by the sexes in flight, that of the male being nearly an octave higher than that of the female. This is true in some 27 species that I have studied in the field in North America and the West Indies. In all these cases the sounds are produced solely by the displacement of air caused by the movement of the wings in flight.
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© 1974 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Belton, P. (1974). An Analysis of Direction Finding in Male Mosquitoes. In: Barton Browne, L. (eds) Experimental Analysis of Insect Behaviour. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-86666-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-86666-1_10
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