Textbook cricket goes to the field: the ecological scene of the neuroethological play

Sensory ecology has recently emerged as a new focus in the study of how organisms acquire and respond to information from and about their environment. Many sensory scientists now routinely explore the physiological basis of sensing, such as vision, chemoreception or echolocation, in an ecological context. By contrast, research on one of the most performing sensors in the animal kingdom, the wind-sensitive escape system of crickets and cockroaches, has failed so far to encompass ecological and evolutionary considerations. We report survival and behavioural experiments in which wood crickets interacted freely with natural predators in the field. Our results illustrate how the lack of knowledge about the ecology of these insects may entail our understanding of the biological relevance of their wind sensors. We found that predation pressure was most important on early stage crickets. Because laboratory studies have focused exclusively on adults' sensory systems, it is crucial that physical, physiological and neurobiological studies now turn to juveniles. Another common assumption challenged by our results is the nature of the air flow to which crickets are sensitive. Our results identify wolf spiders as the major predatory risk for wood crickets. Air movement stimuli produced by hunting spiders are likely to be strikingly different from air flows produced by flying insects. Yet, our theoretical understanding of air motion sensing is currently drawn from oscillatory flows of flying predators only.