Cricket balls...

How big are cricket balls?  Good question.  Apparently.. pretty gosh darn big.  The Tuberous bush cricket (see photo if age over 18), has testes that amount to 13.8 per cent of it’s body mass.  (If he was a human that would be the equivalent of 10 kilo testicles - or the size of a tyre.)

Apparently this is the only cricket that doesn’t jump – but just walks tentatively around very very very carefully.  Okay.. that’s not true, but you’d have to assume a certain sensitivity around that region. Perhaps that is why cricket’s have such a high chirping sound. 

Here’s a tip for you.  If a scientist is about to poke your testicles with a sharp thing.. your day is just about to get worse.  And why is he smiling like that?  This guy enjoys his work far to much.  Bet he used to tear the wings of flies when he was a kid.  Someone told me that if you tore one wing of a fly, it would just go in circles.  How do you tell the difference?  They all just fly around in circles.  Maybe they would fly in a straight line.  Okay – there is your homework.  Go find out and report back.

Here’s a fun fact.  You can tell the temperature by counting cricket chirps.  Go outside at night, and count the number of chirps a cricket makes in a 15 second period.  Then add 40 and this is the temperature in degree’s Fahrenheit.  Now divide by the first number you thought of, add the date of your birth day, and round down to the nearest 10.  That is a random number.  Fascinating huh?

A cricket is omnivorous.. they eat everything.  But their favourite food is rotten fruit, leaves, and a chicken Caesar salad if the anchovies are removed first.  Finally, crickets have their ear like sound receptors on their legs.  And this explains the common phrase ‘talk to the legs, because the testicles don’t want to hear it no more’.  Class dismissed.