Singing in secret..

I am so thrilled to share this work with you! With a team of truly amazing collaborators and after several years of hard work, our data suggest that purring crickets may be singing in secret! It looks like the deadly acoustically orienting flies cannot find them, but female crickets can. We were able to measure the selective environment surrounding the origin of a new sexual signal, and it wasn’t what we expected…

Check out our new paper!

We also wrote a blog post that has great pictures of us doing the research. Check it out!

How do new animal conversations begin?

I’ve been discussing this question with some absolutely brilliant scientists over the past two years. New mating signals probably evolve rather easily, especially with environmental change, but we still have many open questions. Check out our new paper!