Dolbear's law

Common card · No. 429013

Dolbear's law states the relationship between the air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp. It was formulated by physicist Amos Dolbear and published in 1897 in an article called "The Cricket as a Thermometer". Dolbear's observations on the relation between chirp rate and temperature were preceded by an 1881 report by Margarette W. Brooks, of Salem, Massachusetts, in her letter to the Editor of Popular Science Monthly — although, it seems, Dolbear knew nothing of Brooks' earlier letter until after his article was published in 1897. Dolbear did not specify the species of cricket which he observed, although subsequent researchers assumed it to be the snowy tree cricket, Oecanthus niveus. However, the snowy tree cricket was misidentified as O. niveus in early reports and the correct scientific name for this species is Oecanthus fultoni. The chirping of the more common field crickets is not as reliably correlated to temperature—their chirping rate varies depending on other factors...

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