Crickets change the speed of their chirping according to the temperature.
Nicole Garner Meeker – Physicist Amos E. Dolbear is known for his work on early telephones and other inventions, but an 1897 issue of The American Naturalist contained a different type of scientific contribution: the hypothesis that cricket chirps are linked to air temperature.
Dolbear’s observations (likely of snowy tree crickets, or Oecanthus fultoni) led him to theorize that the frequency of their chirps increased with warmer weather, and slowed as the thermometer fell. Surely, the phenomenon could be used to “easily compute the temperature when the number of chirps per minute is known,” Dolbear wrote.
Most entomologists now agree that his theory — called Dolbear’s Law — is pretty spot-on, thanks to how insects respond to environmental changes.