ROBIN TINGHITELLA

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST

- Kellan Brooks

Imagine that you're a cricket happily chirping away. What if your mating song begins to attract a deadly enemy? Would you continue to call out? Or would you hush up, hoping to slip quietly under the radar?

For the past 20 years, Robin Tinghitella, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Denver in Colorado, has been studying a species of field cricket in Hawaii. She has observed them abandon their signature chirp and fall silent to avoid detection by predators. The crickets were thought to have lost their song for good, until a recent discovery by Tinghitella turned what we know about crickets upside-down and uncovered a new type of song-one that is curiously cat-like in nature.

WHEN I THINK OF FIELD CRICKETS, I IMMEDIATELY THINK OF CHIRPING NOISES.

A lot of people often think that crickets rub their legs together to chirp. They're actually using their wings!

WHY DO THEY MAKE THAT NOISE?

Only male crickets make noise, and they're usually using it to call for a female mate. Females don't have any of the wing structures needed to chirp or vibrate. In fact, females don't even have the behavior of rubbing their wings together that creates the chirp.

SO, MALE CRICKETS HAVE UNIQUE WING STRUCTURES THAT THEY RUB TOGETHER TO PRODUCE A CHIRP?

They have what we call a file and scraper system on their two forewings. [Crickets have two sets of wings including forewings and hindwings.] The file is a modified wing vein that has all these evenly spaced-out "teeth” on it, like a saw. A sound is produced when the file comes in contact with the scraper on the paired wing. We call that rubbing wing motion "stridulation."

DO ALL CRICKETS CHIRP THE SAME?