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Research
Hey there, welcome to The Cricket Wing!
We are interested in one of nature's most charismatic choruses - crickets. Read on to learn about what crickets can teach us about evolution, behaviour, and parasitism, and how traffic noise impacts immunity and reproduction.
Our study system
In the Hawaiian Islands, you'll find one of nature's most unique host-parasite systems. The Pacific field cricket (Teleogryllus oceanicus) was introduced to the Hawaiian Islands either a few hundred years ago with cargo ships, or some 1,500 years ago with early Polynesian settlers. These crickets are native to Australasia (where their ancestral populations are still found), and only in the Hawaiian Islands are they subject to the lethal, acoustically-orienting parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea.
Parasitoids are an especially sinister brand of parasite - namely, their larvae slowly consume their host from the inside. Parasitoids, by definition, kill their host; though they do so slowly. They eat only fatty deposits at first, ensuring their meat home stays alive long enough for them to fully mature to the pupal stage.
Eavesdropping female Ormia flies listen in on singing male crickets to find hosts for their larvae. In the Hawaiian Islands, the pressure of parasitism on crickets is so great certain males have evolved flat wings which cannot produce sound. These males are unable to attract females, so to acquire matings, they employ a satellite strategy. Basically, they listen in on singing males, and intercept females as they approach them. In recent years, rapid adaptive evolution has resulted in numerous other wing types which are somewhat like the normal wing singing males, but produce slightly different songs. This offers an unprecedented opportunity to study evolution in action. These wings are feminised and have extremely reduced sound producing structures.
Here are some line drawings of wing types with sound producing structures highlighted (mirror, harp, and scraper are turquoise, purple, and yellow, respectively). The leftmost is a female cricket wing, which entirely lacks sound producing structures. To the right is a normal-wing male wing, following by two variations of flatwing male wings (one from the Hawaiian Island of Kauai, and the other from Oahu). *see reference at the bottom of the page for origin of the image.
Why do crickets chirp, and how do they do it?
One of the primary reasons that male crickets chirp is to attract female crickets to mate. They chirp by rubbing their wings together, running two comb-like structures (called a "file" and a "scraper") across one another. This behaviour is called stridulation, and it produces what we call a song.
Typically, male crickets produce a "long distance calling song" which broadcasts their location to female crickets. This is followed by a "courtship song" which is more of a gentle whisper in the ear (fun fact - cricket's ears are located on their legs). If females are enticed by the courtship song, copulation ensues (cue the Marvin Gaye).
Female crickets (left) have smooth, silent wings with a bit of venation and a long ovipositor (the thin, needle like protrusion from their back end) which they use to lay eggs in soil. Male crickets (right) typically have wings with sound producing features on them (you can see some bumps and ridges on this males' wings).
Why do we care about cricket song?
Cricket song is interesting because not only do female crickets use it to discriminate between potential mates, but as you can imagine it also makes males super conspicuous to predators and parasites. So, male crickets must balance the fitness benefits of singing against the associated survival costs. That's where we come in: one aspect of our research centres around understanding the strategies crickets have evolved to simultaneously attract females whilst avoiding parasites.
Why might crickets be impacted by noise pollution?
It's clear that singing and hearing is an integral part of a cricket's life. As urbanization increases, so do threats like increased noise pollution, which is known to negatively impact many organisms, especially those that rely on acoustic communication. However, less than 4% of existing noise research has focused on invertebrates like our crickets. Invertebrates are particularly vulnerable to noise pollution because they can hear sounds in the spectra of human-generated noise and they rely on communication at these frequencies. In addition, they are the most biodiverse groups of animals on the planet, and if noise is impacting their physiology or survival, this could have cascading impacts through entire food webs!
What are the goals of our research?
Rapid Evolution
We want to know how the males that still sing to attract females (called normal wing males) avoid the parasitoid fly. Because evolution is happening so quickly in this population, it's likely that multiple strategies are being "tested" in the wild. For example, it could be that normal wing males only sing at times of night that the fly is not active. Another possibility is that certain components of the calling song have evolved to make males less conspicuous to the fly than they used to be. We've performed a suite of experiments in the lab to test these different ideas. The result being a whole lot of audio recordings of these little guys!
That's where you come in. We need your help to parse through the audio and train an algorithm to detect cricket song. We'll keep updating the page as we develop more tasks, so keep an eye out for project updates!
Noise Pollution
With the growing spread of urbanization, we are interested in how these crickets are impacted by traffic noise. Previous work has revealed impacts of traffic noise on mate searching behavior, but how about cricket physiology? We raised crickets in 4 different traffic noise level treatments that vary in volume. Once they became adults, we measured immune and reproductive traits of each cricket.
This is where we need your help! We have images of live and dead sperm cells, and we need help counting them to see if crickets raised in silence have a higher ratio of live to dead cells compared to crickets raised in loud traffic noise. We also have images of immune cells (hemocytes), and we need help counting to see if crickets raised in silence have more immune cells than those raised in loud traffic noise!
Crickets in the News - Press Coverage
Hawaii Crickets Have Evolved to Purr Like Cats
Evolution at Work: Crickets on Molokai are Now...Purring
How Crickets Can Tell Us More About Urban Noise Pollution
One Overlooked Action Could Be Destroying Entire Ecosystems
Hawaii Crickets Started Purring Like Cats to Attract Mates
Crickets on Hawaiian Island Develop Silent Wings in Response to Parasitic Attack
Quick Evolution Leads to Quiet Crickets
Crickets on Mute: Hush Falls as Killer Fly Stalks Singers
*Bailey, Nathan W., Sonia Pascoal, and Fernando Montealegre-Z. "Testing the role of trait reversal in evolutionary diversification using song loss in wild crickets." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.18 (2019): 8941-8949.