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Males of many crickets species use calling songs as sexual signals. Females locate and select singing males even in the dark of night, and can be very choosy in their mating preferences. This is indeed the business as usual in many populations of the Pacific field cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, but not in Hawaii, where there is a deadly enemy, the fly Ormia ochracea. The fly is a parasitoid that uses song to find and lay larvae on the singing males. The larvae then find their way inside the bodies of the unfortunate singers and feast on their internal tissues, eventually killing the host.

In 2006 Marlene Zuk and collaborators documented the rapid spread of a silent male morph in a population of Teleogryllus oceanicus in Kauai Island, Havaii. The morph is called 'flatwings' as it lacks the wing structures used to produce songs. The change is caused by a single gene in the sexual chromosome of males. Flatwing males escape from the parasitoid, but also are not found by females. They have a 'satellite' sexual behavior – to attempt to mate females that are attracted by calling males. Currently about 90% of the male crickets in Kauai were of the flatwing morph. Such a huge proportion of silent satellites rely on the few remaining singing males to reproduce.