Acoustic Experience Interacts with Perceived Risk of Predation in Shaping Female Response in Crickets Narmin S. Ghalichi & Justa L. Heinen-Kay & Marlene Zuk Received: 27 October 2019 /Revised: 26 April 2020 /Accepted: 13 May 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Female response to male sexual signals is context dependent and influenced by a variety of envi- ronmental factors. For instance, females often adjust mating preferences in response to predation risk. Social experiences as a juvenile, such as exposure to conspe- cific sexual signals, have also been shown to influence female mating preferences as adults. Experiments that examine the influence of both environmental factors and early social experiences on female preferences are need- ed to understand female mating behaviors in the wild. In Pacific field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus), males produce a calling song that females evaluate during mate choice. We examined the influence of both risk perception and juvenile exposure to calling song in shaping adult T. oceanicus female phonotaxis to either a high- or low-quality calling song. We predicted that females raised in song-less conditions would be more responsive to calling song to maximize mating oppor- tunities, and that females would show reduced response to calling in a risky, open area. Females raised in a song- deprived environment were much more responsive to calling song compared to those reared with song. In contrast to our predictions, females raised in song-less conditions were more responsive to the high-quality song in the risky, open arena. These results suggest that juvenile acoustic rearing influences female responsive- ness to male calling song, but it has less influence on strength of preference for signal quality. Keywords Sexual selection . predation . Teleogryllus oceanicus . female preference Introduction Although many studies of female choice assume that females behave the same way under all circumstances (Andersson 1994) increasing evidence shows that fe- males display plasticity by adjusting their mate choice in response to environmental conditions (Bakker and Milinski 1991; Backwell et al. 1999; Bateman et al. 2001). Expressed in highly variable environments, fe- male response to male sexual signals is condition and context dependent (Bailey 2008; Jennions and Petrie 1997). For instance, females may be less discriminating in response to low male availability (Atwell and Wagner 2015; Fowler-Finn and Rodríguez 2012), poor nutrition- al status (Hebets2008), or low quality of male sexual signals (Hedrick and Weber 1998). High risk of preda- tion is also expected to have a large impact on female response because it affects the cost of expressing pref- erences. For example, several studies have shown that female crickets exhibit weaker preferences when J Insect Behav https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-020-09744-y Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-020-09744-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. N. S. Ghalichi : J. L. Heinen-Kay : M. Zuk Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA N. S. Ghalichi (*) Department of Biological Sciences, 304 Life Sciences Building, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA e-mail: nghalic@bgsu.edu