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Alex from ?? asked:

Does loud music hurt insects hearing?

and we said:

Well, it is true that many insects have ears or at least a membrane (called a "tympanum") that vibrates when airborne sounds hit it.  And it is also true that insects respond to audible cues that they receive from their habitat. Of course, if crickets are going to make all the noise they do, the others ought to be able to hear them, right?! (By the way, most crickets have their ears on their knees!)

If a moth is being chased by a bat, it can hear the bat coming since bats hunt with echolocation.  Echo-location is the way bats find their food -- they make a sound that they can hear bounce off of objects in front of them. If a bat is chasing a moth, the moth can hear the sounds and take evasive action.  Some moths can even make their own noise that jams the bat's signals. It's a jungle out there.

So while there is a great deal of evidence that insects can hear noises around them, and while scientists are quick to torture insects every way they can, there is not a lot of research that shows whether loud rock music can hurt insects' ears.

If a researcher were asking this question, he or she would first try to define what is meant by "hurt".  If you could effectively measure pain in an insect you could answer your question easily.  But pain is a difficult thing to measure.  It is quite possible to show responses of tissues to certain mechanical actions. Researchers can hook a machine up to an insect's nerves and pull its leg off and get a reading on the machine. That shows that
something happens to the nerve. But it then stops firing right away and apparently the nerve dies. So no more signal. It's a good adaptation if you don't want to have to "act" hurt.

Pain is a reaction to something that is bad for an animal. If we put our hand on a hot stove, it hurts so we pull our hand away. if it didn't hurt and we left our hand there, it would get all burned up. Since insects developed through many many generations before humans came around, there probably weren't many sounds that even could hurt their ears. Think about it, the loudest noise they probably heard regularly was thunder. So, there may be no real sensitivity to loud noises in insect hearing.

Here is a paper about the damage that military noises cause to wildlife. It might give you some helpful information.

http://nhsbig.inhs.uiuc.edu/bioacoustics/noise_and_wildlife.txt

Thanks again for Askin' BUGMAN!