Auditory and distance cues interact to modulate female gray treefrog preferences for male advertisement calls

Anurans use different sensory modalities to communicate and interact socially, including acoustic, chemical, tactile, and visual signals. In a multimodal context, these sensory modes can transmit different information to the receiver or even reinforce the same message. In this study, we hypothesized that body colour traits and vocal sac movements of male eastern gray treefrogs [Dryophytes versicolor (= Hyla versicolor)] serve as secondary visual cues that increase their attractiveness while calling to attract mates. We tested this hypothesis using playback trials combining synthetic advertisement calls with a variety of visual cues, including differently coloured resin frog models, simulated vocal sacs, and live frogs. None of the visual stimuli tested impacted female choice, and there was no difference in response rate, response time, choice angle, or distance covered in the arena between multimodal and unimodal stimuli. However, females showed a strong preference for longer calls even if the less attractive calls were paired with a visual stimulus. The study provides comprehensive insights into the role of visual stimuli in the mate attraction of eastern gray treefrogs and suggests that call traits play a dominant role in the male-selection process of this species, contrary to what was observed for visual stimuli.

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Time and place affect the acoustic structure of frog advertisement calls

James,

Ryan

2024

Current Zoology

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Acoustic communication signals are important for species recognition and mate attraction across numerous taxa. For instance, most of the thousands of species of frogs have a species-specific advertisement call that females use to localize and discriminate among potential mates. Thus, the acoustic structure of the advertisement call is critical for reproductive success. The acoustic structure of calls will generally diverge over evolutionary time and can be influenced by the calls of sympatric species. While many studies have shown the influence of geography on contemporary call variation in populations of frogs, no study has compared the acoustic structure of frog calls across many species to ask whether we can detect an influence of divergence time and overall geographic overlap on the differences in acoustic structure of species-typical calls that we observe now. To this end, we compared acoustic features of the calls of 225 species of frogs within 4 families. Furthermore, we used a behavioral assay from one species of frog to determine which acoustic features to prioritize in our large-scale analyses. We found evidence that both phylogeny (time) and geography (place) relate to advertisement call acoustics albeit with large variation in these relationships across the four families in the analysis. Overall, these results suggest that, despite the many ecological and evolutionary forces that influence call structure, the broad forces of time and place can shape aspects of advertisement call acoustics.

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Auditory and distance cues interact to modulate female gray treefrog preferences for male advertisement calls

Cited by 3 publications

References 103 publications

Social modulation of spatial dynamics in treefrog choruses

Social modulation of spatial dynamics in treefrog choruses

Visual cues do not function in a multimodal signalling context for mate attraction in eastern gray treefrogs

Time and place affect the acoustic structure of frog advertisement calls

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