Do you find that just the sound of Rush Limbaugh drives you mad? If so, you're not alone. Even the bark beetles that are killing western pine trees in large numbers won't put up with the sound of Limbaugh's voice:
To combat such infestations, scientists thought up the "nastiest, most offensive sounds" they could. Those included recordings of Guns & Roses, Queen, Rush Limbaugh and manipulated versions of the insects' own sounds.
Apparently the beetles didn't feel especially Welcome to the Jungle and Sweet Child of Mine didn't lead to reproductive urges, but researchers and beetles alike drew the line when it came to the conservative bloviator:
Richard Hofstetter, an entomology professor at Northern Arizona University who worked on the project, told Discovery News that "the most annoying sound" his colleague, Reagan McGuire, "could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music."
McGuire started to pump the sounds of Limbaugh into portions of infested tree trunks brought into their lab, but Hofstetter said McGuire "could not bear listening to Limbaugh, so he ended up playing Rush backwards, which still kept the voice and intonation the same, but the words were meaningless."
As if Rush's words would be meaningful if not played backwards.
Unfortunately, and unlike most humans, beetles developed a tolerance to Limbaugh:
[Hofstetter] and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while.
So instead, researchers played back amplified versions of the beetles' own sounds with surprising results:
[Researchers] focused on an aggression call produced by males of the "tree killer" Dendroctonus species.
By making this call longer and louder than usual, they altered the beetles' behavior.
"We found we could disrupt mating, tunneling and reproduction," Hofstetter said. "We could even make the beetles turn on each other, which normally they would not do."
This was particularly graphic when the researchers played the manipulated sounds right as a male and female beetle were about to mate.
Hofstetter said his team would "watch in horror as the male beetle would tear the female apart."
There was no indication if the male beetles used in the recordings were overweight drug addicted sex tourists, suggesting further research is required.
Unfortunately:
"There is still a lot of basic research to be done to better describe the hearing ability of the beetles, but after years of focusing on chemical signals, this is a promising new line of attack," [Wulfia] Gronenberg [an associate professor of neuroscience, ecology and evolutionary biology at The University of Arizona,] said, adding that "the practical application will also require some new ideas, unless you want to put a loudspeaker on every tree."