Abstract
This chapter provides a brief history of the study of insect hearing from a personal perspective, covering the period from 1960 to the present. Insect bioacoustics developed in parallel in the 1960s with the emergence of invertebrate neurobiology and then in the 1970s with the emergence of the field of neuroethology. The age of invertebrate neuroscience coincided with intracellular techniques and the concept of identified neurons in small networks that generated behavioral acts. The golden age of neuroethology (1975–2000) heralded comparative approaches that resulted in invertebrate animal researchers having serious interactions with vertebrate physiologists and anatomists that led to remarkable advances in comparative bioacoustics, for which the SHAR series has played the key role of scribe and witness. My chapter is restricted to the bioacoustics of insects because they are the most acoustically active of all the invertebrate animals. Insect bioacoustics has focused on two main theme areas: acoustic signals that mediate predator–prey interactions and acoustic signals that mediate intraspecific social behavior such as mating and territorial behavior. The kinds of hearing of hearing organs that evolved in response to the imperatives of natural selection and sexual selection are remarkable in form and function.
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Hoy, R.R. (2014). Hearing in Insects: The Why, When, and How. In: Popper, A., Fay, R. (eds) Perspectives on Auditory Research. Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, vol 50. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9102-6_16
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