Cade completed his BA (1968), MA (1972) and PhD (1976) in Zoology at the University of Texas at Austin. While an undergraduate at Texas, Cade became a member of the Tau chapter of the Kappa Sigma fraternity.[2]
William Cade has done research in evolution of animal behavior, insect reproductive behavior, acoustic signals in cricket, cockroach mating behavior, and parasite-prey coevolution.
With his wife, Cade has done more than 30 years of research on the Texas field cricket, Gryllus texensis.[5] He also had a long collaboration with Dan Otte collecting and studying the crickets and grasshoppersofAfrica.[6] In 1975, together with his wife, he discovered the parasitic fly Ormia ochracea is attracted to the song of male crickets. Only female flies are attracted to the song, and they deposit living larvae on and in the vicinity of calling males. The larvae burrow into and eat the cricket who dies in about 7 days when the flies pupate. This was the first example of a natural enemy that locates its host or prey using the mating signal of the host/prey.[7] In 2006, research by Marlene Zuk revealed that pressure from the O. ochracea caused the crickets to evolve a silent male with wings that look like female wings, one of the fastest recorded examples of evolution.[8]
^Male mating success, calling and searching behavior at high and low density in the field cricket, Gryllus integer William H. Cade & Elsa Salazar Cade, Animal Behavior, 1992, pp. 43, 49-56.
^Alternation calling and spacing patterns in the field cricket Acanthogryllus fortipes (Orthoptera; Gryllidae). William H. Cade and Daniel Otte, Canadian Journal of Zoology, pp. 2916-2920
^Cade, W. H. 1975. Acoustically orienting parasitoids: Fly phonotaxis to cricket song. Science 190: pp. 1312-1313.
