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1. Primary succession after a volcanic eruption is a major ecological process, but relatively little is known about insects that colonise barren lava before plants become established.

2. On Hawai'i Island, the endemic cricket,Caconemobius foriGurney & Rentz, 1978, is known as the first multicellular life form to colonise lava after an eruption from Kīlauea Volcano. In the Kona region, a congener,Caconemobius anahuluOtte, 1994 inhabits unvegetated lava flows from Hualālai Volcano, but little has been documented about its distribution.

3. Our aim was to characterise the presence/absence ofCaconemobiusspp.across lava flows that are largely unvegetated, but differ in age since eruption and connectivity to older flows. We used baited live traps to survey 9 month–50 year‐old Kīlauea lava flows forC. fori, and ∼220 year‐old Hualālai lava flows forC. anahulu.

4. We found no evidence thatC. forihas colonised the Kīlauea flows from the 2018 eruption. However, we did discover thatC. foriwas persistent and widespread on Kīlauea lava up to 50 years old within Hawai'i Volcanos National Park. We also capturedC. anahuluacross much of the Hualālai lava flows we surveyed in Kona.

5. We demonstrated thatC. forido not always arrive on new lava within months after an eruption, in contrast to previous reports, and that bothC. foriandC. anahulucan remain on lava longer than previously appreciated. Vegetation successional state may be more important than true age for the persistence of these endemic crickets.

Migration can allow individuals to escape parasite infection, which can lead to a lower infection probability (prevalence) in a population and/or fewer parasites per individual (intensity). Because individuals with more parasites often have lower survival and/or fecundity, infection intensity shapes the life‐history trade‐offs determining when migration is favored as a strategy to escape infection. Yet, most theory relies on susceptible‐infected (SI) modeling frameworks, defining individuals as either healthy or infected, ignoring details of infection intensity. Here, we develop a novel modeling approach that captures infection intensity as a spectrum, and ask under what conditions migration evolves as function of how infection intensity changes over time. We show that relative timescales of migration and infection accumulation determine when migration is favored. We also find that population‐level heterogeneity in infection intensity can lead to partial migration, where less‐infected individuals migrate while more infected individuals remain resident. Our model is one of the first to consider how infection intensity can lead to migration. Our results frame migratory escape in light of infection intensity rather than prevalence, thus demonstrating that decreased infection intensity should be considered a benefit of migration, alongside other typical drivers of migration.

Most studies on the evolution of migration focus on food, mates and/or climate as factors influencing these movements, whereas negative species interactions such as predators, parasites and pathogens are often ignored. Although infection and its associated costs clearly have the potential to influence migration, thoroughly studying these interactions is challenging without a solid theoretical framework from which to develop testable predictions in natural systems.

How populations adapt, or not, to rapid evolution of sexual signals has important implications for population viability, but is difficult to assess due to the paucity of examples of sexual signals evolving in real time. In Hawaiian populations of the Pacific field cricket (Teleogryllus oceanicus), selection from a deadly parasitoid fly has driven the rapid loss of a male acoustic signal, calling song, that females use to locate and evaluate potential mates. In this newly quiet environment where many males are obligately silent, how do phonotactic females find mates? Previous work has shown that the acoustic rearing environment (presence or absence of male calling song) during late juvenile stages and early adulthood exposes adaptive flexibility in locomotor behaviors of males, as well as mating behaviors in both sexes that helps facilitate the spread of silent (flatwing) males. Here, we tested whether females also show acoustically induced plasticity in walking behaviors using laboratory‐reared populations ofT. oceanicusfrom Kauai (HI; >90% flatwings), Oahu (HI; ~50% flatwings), and Mangaia (Cook Islands; no flatwings or parasitoid fly). Though we predicted that females reared without song exposure would increase walking behaviors to facilitate mate localization when song is rare, we discovered that, unlike males, femaleT. oceanicusshowed relatively little plasticity in exploratory behaviors in response to an acoustic rearing environment. Across all three populations, exposure to male calling song during development did not affect latency to begin walking, distance walked, or general activity of female crickets. However, females reared in the absence of song walked slower and showed a marginally non‐significant tendency to walk for longer durations of time in a novel environment than those reared in the presence of song. Overall, plasticity in female walking behaviors appears unlikely to have facilitated sexual signal loss in this species.