Frogs, crickets - and even cicadas - have always been known for their singing. Now it seems that fruit flies too can produce
a variety of sounds that may amount to a romantic tune. When a male fruit fly meets a female, he responds with a song, intendd to capture her attention. That in itself is not so unusual. What really sets fruit flies apart is their repertoire. Apparently, fruit flies are far more capable of creating music than their fellow insect musicians.
Investigators have recorded the songs of three species of drosophila and analyzed them on an oscilloscope. They found that the songs could be classified into four distinct acoustic types: click trains like those
produced by cicadas, complex pulse trains like those of crickets, simple pulse trains and simple tone trains. Moreover, the way in which these sounds are produced is highly varied. Click trains, made by the males of D. fasciculisetae, consist of repeated short bursts of high
frequency pilses (six kilohertz on the average). These sounds are produced by vibrations at the base of the wing. Similar high frequency patterns have been recorded from cicadas and katydids but have not been known to occur in flies. Although it is the cricket which is portayed as a violinist in many stories, the fruit fly could fit the description better.