Every 13 or 17 years, the buzzy mating call of billions of cicadas is the soundtrack of the summer in some parts of the United States. Their clicky noises are so loud that they could potentially be detected by the same fiber optic cables that help deliver high-speed internet. A proof-of-concept study published November 30 in the Entomological Society of America’s Journal of Insect Science describes how this technology could help track the these loud and fleeting insects
[Related: The Brood X cicadas are coming, and you should eat them. Here’s how.]
When hung on a utility pole, fiber optic cables can be used as a sensor to detect changes in temperature, vibrations, and very loud noises. This emerging technology is called distributed fiber optic sensing and it was tested in the study.
“I was surprised and excited to learn how much information about the calls was gathered, despite it being located near a busy section of Middlesex County in New Jersey,” study co-author and entomologist Jessica Ware said in a statement. Ware is the associate curator and chair of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Measuring ‘backscatter’
According to the team, distributed fiber optic sensing is based on finding and analyzing the backscatter when an optical pulse is sent through a fiber cable. Backscatter occurs when small imperfections or disturbances in the cable cause a tiny amount of the signal to bounce back to the source. Technicians can time the arrival of the backscattered light to calculate exactly where along the cable the light bounced back. Monitoring how backscatter varies over time creates a signature of the disturbance. In acoustic sensing, this signature can indicate the frequency of the sound and volume in the cable.
One sensor can also be deployed on a large segment of cable. According to the study, a 31-mile-long cable with a sensor can detect the location of…
Read the full article here