Brandon Woo’s boots crunched on the gravelly Tobe Spring Trail as he hiked into the cool August night. Stars pricked through the moonless sky, casting a pale glow on the path that cut through a canyon in the Davis Mountains Preserve. The Texas A&M doctoral student scanned the trail ahead as galaxies of dust spun in his headlamp’s cone of light. While two of his entomology colleagues turned over rocks to see what insects might be hiding there, Woo listened. Years of orthoptera field collection have given him a keen ear for the different buzzes, chirps, and trills crickets make as they signal to potential mates.

Just then, something at Woo’s feet caught his attention: an enormous cricket with a fat, zebra-striped back and bulbous head. It was a Jerusalem cricket—that much he knew immediat

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