A Treehopper egg, nestled with it's siblings in the bark of a Calliandra tree
begins it's insect life.
This is my current obsession here.
They have such an intensive interaction with one another.
Females will lay a clutch of eggs, and they'll sit on their clutch of eggs
and they click at them.
They make little clicking vibrations.
Are they talking to their babies before they hatch?
What are they doing?
Just one of the mysteries in this hidden world of the Treehopper communication.
Treehoppers live on plants, sucking sap with their piercing mouth parts.
This diverse group of insects known for their elaborate head ornaments includes more than
3,000 known species.
Some of them look like little bits of dried plant debris.
But others are just alien structures that could come from Mars.
They're just weird and fascinating and beautiful to look at.
And that'd how I started to become interested in them.
Treehoppes live in tropical habitats, as well as temperate ones.
Right here in Wisconsin- that's Treehopper country.
Look for tiny little Brontosauruses.
They can be deceptively still.
That's the weird thing, you don't hear anything and you think they're doing nothing-
they're boring.
But this seemingly peaceful world, where insects scuttle across plant leaves, is far from tranquil.
Out of range of human ears, Treehoppers are making a racket.
This is not sound we can't hear it.
Yet, the animals are busy communicating with one another.
Treehoppers communicate by using vibrations they make with their bodies.
They kinda hitch up their abdomens and they lock their legs and then they vibrate their
abdomen up and down.
The vibrations travel through the plant and are picked up by sensory nerves in the legs
of other Treehoppers.
They're known to use vibrations while foraging to find mates and warn others about predators.
We can't hear these vibrations but researchers can translate them for us.
By bouncing a laser beam off the vibrating surface of a stem, they can measure the frequency
and amplitude of the movement.
And then you play back that signal.
Here a male searches for a mate.
The male produces his courtship signal.
It sounds like this: mmbrrhh!
The signal travels throughout the pant and reaches an interested female.
She responds back to him: hmmmm.
They'll duet this way.
Until he finds her.
Alas, this is not a private affair, competitor males are also tuning in.
They start jamming each other.
This time however, the signal jamming is not successful, the male and female find each other
and mate.
From hatching to laying eggs, a Treehopper can spend her whole short life living and
communicating through the same tig.
Treehoppers arent the only ones to use vibrations.
There's a lot of insects and a lot of spiders that have this form of communication.
The latest number is something like 190,000 species of insects communicate this way.
It's really common and we know very little about it.
These vibrations, it seems, are happening all around us.
When we listen in a new way, a whole world is opened up.
A world that's been there all along.