ROBIN TINGHITELLA
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
