Cooperation and Conflict in the Evolution of Signal Interactions

Abstract

Various invertebrate and vertebrate species in which males produce acoustic or bioluminescent signals for long-range sexual advertisement exhibit collective patterns of temporal signal interactions. These patterns range from simple concentrations of signaling during a narrow diel interval to synchronous and alternating interactions entailing precisely timed phase relationships between neighboring individuals. Signals involved in synchrony and alternation are generally produced with rhythms that are under the control of central nervous oscillators. Neighboring individuals effect these interactions via mutual phase delays or phase advances of their oscillators or actual changes in the free-running periods of their oscillators. Both synchrony and alternation may represent adaptations to avoid spiteful behavior or to maximize the ability of a local group to attract females or evade natural enemies. Alternatively, these collective patterns may represent incidental outcomes of competition between males jamming each other's signals. The neural mechanisms that effect signal jamming can be selected for by critical psychophysical factors such as precedence effects. Additional competitive pressures that may generate synchrony, alternation, and other collective patterns of signal interaction include mutual assessment of rivals, evasion of detection by dominant individuals, disruption of communication within courting pairs, and narrowness of the time intervals during which receptive females are present. 97

Female mate choice across spatial scales: influence of lek and male attributes on mating success of blue-crowned manakins

“…Changes in behaviour can be caused by social facilitation, if males stimulate each other during display (Brooke et al 2000), or if increased competition at larger leks cause males to invest more in display (Greenfield 1994). This would imply that individual display is determined primarily by the social environment and mate choice based on display rates would not have adaptive value.…”

Signal interactions and interference in insect choruses: singing and listening in the social environment

“…However, call alternation is generally more precise than the synchrony that arises from inhibitory resetting. Call alternation is typically found in species with slower free-running rhythms (≤1 call s −1 ), while synchrony is the common alignment in species and populations with faster rhythms (>1 call s −1 ) (Greenfield 1994a). Phase alignments by inhibitory resetting are not observed for rhythms faster than 5 s −1 , a limit that may reflect temporal constraints in chirping insects.…”

“…While binaural hearing may allow her to discriminate the amplitude of a male to the left from that of a male to the right, she will nonetheless remain within a combined sound field that is formed from the linear superposition of sound waves broadcast by the several males. And even when the males' calls do not overlap in time to create this combined sound field, she may still be influenced by temporal relationships between their songs (Greenfield 1994a). These issues are less likely in olfaction and vision: Odor molecules generally spread from their sources by convection, and pheromone plumes drifting downwind in air or downstream in water from separated signalers may remain as distinct filaments over considerable distances (Liu and Haynes 1992;Baker et al 1998).…”

Five fundamental constraints on theories of the origins of music

“…These species of 'natural synchronizers' are few in number and far removed from us in evolutionary terms, being found among species of fireflies, crickets, cicadas and fiddler crabs [79,80]. To these may be added some marine bioluminescent crustaceans [81], and the rattan ant [82], the latter virtually unstudied (see below).…”

“…A plausible setting for such a development is the male group territoriality combined with female exogamy-a rare pattern among higher animals-that can be assumed to have characterized the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees [69,98,99]. Merker [42,69,87] noted the striking parallelism between this pattern and the male clumping combined with female migration that is the functional and evolutionary key to synchronous chorusing in the insect examples cited in the previous section [79], and proposed it as a selection pressure for the evolution of the human entrainment capacity [42,69,87]. As noted by Merker et al [69], such a scenario is eminently compatible with the central tenet of the coalition signalling scenario proposed by Hagen & Bryant [100].…”