Opto-acoustic audio recordings of aphids and beetles. Rothamsted Research.

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Opto-acoustic recorders have been utilised to record the flight of weak-flying insects including aphids (Hemiptera: Aphididae) and beetles (Coleoptera). These data include 4928 audio recordings collected in 2019 and 2020 of 8 distinct species.

Opto-acoustic recorders capture the variation of light when an insect passes through a light beam. Both the main body and the wings cast a shadow in the emitter’s light beam, known as the extinction of light principle, and this shadow is subsequently detected by a receiver photodiode array (14). The Wingbeat Recorder® (Insectronics, Chania, Crete, Greece) was placed underneath a 15,000 ml heavy-walled glass beaker (Duran™).

Insects were collected and placed inside the beaker. Over a period of two days, insects were free to disperse in and around the sensor. Flights were automatically triggered as an insect enters the field of view of the LED array, generating a recording lasting 0.6 seconds. All flights were saved as an audio file on an SD card within the sensor along with average temperature and humidity covariates. These audio recordings were subject to internal signal processing (Potamitis I, Rigakis I. Large aperture optoelectronic devices to record and time-stamp insects’ wingbeats. IEEE Sensors Journal. 2016;16(15):6053-61.) and have been extracted into this CSV file.

The associated CSV file contains individual audio recordings in each row. Covariate information (species, time of recording, average temperature, average humidity) are detailed in the first 5 columns. Column 6 onwards contains the audio information. The time point (in seconds) of each recorded sound is stored in the associated column name.

Each recording consists of 5000 time points at a sampling rate of 8000 Hz and bit depth of 16. The total duration of the recording was 0.625 seconds

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