ABSTRACT
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 397
Historical Sketch ......................................................................................................................... 397
Systematics ................................................................................................................................. 398
Stridulatory Organs ..................................................................................................................... 398
Biological Meaning of Stridulation ............................................................................................ 402
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... 403
The diversity of sound-producing organs in beetles is amazing and unmatched by any other order of
insects. Beetles have achieved a number of fundamentally different (and in some respects
evolutionarily independent) means of producing sounds by stridulation. Almost every part of the
body technically capable of stridulation, i.e. adjoining parts moving in relation to each other,
have been modified for this purpose in the adults and larvae of one or more groups of beetles
(see Table 30.2). Surprising is the neglect of sound production in beetles in publications on insect
acoustic behaviour and communication, even in standard texts, such as Pierce (1948), Lewis (1983),
Ewing (1989) and Bailey (1991). Haskell (1961), Busnel (1963) and Tuxen (1964), however,
provide substantial overviews.
