Grand Gestures or Love Notes: The Songs of Crickets
One In-Person Session / Free
Wed., Nov. 15, 2023, 6:30-8 pm MT

Animals have evolved a bewildering array of conspicuous traits to attract mates. Flashy dances, neon colors, alluring scents and melodious songs exist in creatures as different as spiders, fish and orangutans. But at first glance, mating traits seem to defy basic principles of natural selection—they are costly to their bearers because they require a lot of energy and can attract deadly predators and parasites. How, then, do these flashy traits arise to start with? And how do animals strike a balance between finding a mate and avoiding attack? In this lecture, DU research scientist Dale Broder highlights new work on how disparate mating and survival pressures have led to varying songs that male crickets use to woo females. Over the past 20 years, researchers have watched and listened as Pacific field crickets in Hawaii first went silent and then later developed new songs that sound like purring cats and cricket drum lines. These new songs seem to protect the crickets from a deadly parasitic fly that eavesdrops on their songs to find hosts for their larvae to feed on. “This is the first time that the evolution of a new animal communication signal has been observed in real time, offering the opportunity to answer questions that otherwise wouldn’t be possible to tackle,” Broder says.

Dale Broder is a research scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Denver working in the lab of Associate Professor and Associate Chair Robin Tinghitella. Together they use field and laboratory approaches to understand the evolutionary forces that shape diversity in animal communication. Dale Broder will be presenting this lecture on behalf of Robin Tinghitella.

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