Effects of Temperature, Body Size, and Hybridization on Mating Calls of Toads, Bufo a. americanus and Bufo woodhousii fowleri

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Copeia. The mating calls of Bufo a. americanus and B. woodhousii fowleri studied in northern New Jersey and on Long Island, New York, consist of trains of pulses uttered at a rate of from 18 to 59 pulses/sec in americanus and 83-161 in fowleri. Pulse rate is highly dependent on body temperature, and approximately doubles with a 10? C increase. Average duration of call ranges from about 4 to 11 sec in americanus and from 1.3 to 2.5 sec in fowleri; call length is negatively correlated with temperature, but is much more variable than pulse rate. An increase in temperature probably exerts a slight, positive effect on dominant frequency, but the effect is largely obscured by individual variation. In general, increasing body size is accompanied by reduced pulse rate, increased length of call and lowered dominant frequency, but within the range of body size found in one population, the effects of differences in body size on mating calls are usually too slight to be detected readily. Limited data suggest that B. a. americanus of the northern and eastern United States produces mating calls with higher pulse rates (at a given temperature) than does B. a. charlesmithi of Oklahoma and Arkansas. The mating calls of hybrid toads have pulse rates intermediate between those of the parental species. When temperature is taken into consideration, there is no overlap in the ranges of pulse rates of 42 fowleri, 24 americanus and five hybrids recorded in one breeding pond. Pulse rate is perhaps a more sensitive criterion of hybridization than is morphology, because individuals indistinguishable morphologically from one of the parent species gave the calls of hybrids. Judging from mating calls, introgression has not measurably influenced the sympatric populations of fowleri and americanus studied.

The use of bioacoustics in anuran taxonomy: theory, terminology, methods and recommendations for best practice

“…Where documented, hybrid calls often have been described to some degree being intermediate between the calls of the parental species (Duellman & Trueb 1994;Wells 2007). This has been described, among others, for Dryophytes cinereus x D. gratiosus (Mecham 1960;Gerhardt et al 1980), Dryophytes avivoca x D. chrysoscelis (Gerhardt 1974), Dryophytes versicolor x D. chrysoscelis (Mable & Bogart 1991), Dryophytes versicolor x Hyla arborea (Mable & Bogart 1991), Spea bombifrons x S. hammondii (Forester 1973), Geocrinia laevis x G. victoriana (Littlejohn & Watson 1976), Crinia pseudinsignifera x C. subinsignifera (Roberts 2010), and toads of the genus Anaxyrus (Blair 1956a, b;Zweifel 1968). In other cases, however, hybrids produce calls more similar to those of one of the parental species and sometimes, calls that include unique traits (e.g., in European water frogs of the genus Pelophylax; Wycherley et al 2002b) where call variation also is in line with genome dosage effects in triploid hybrids (Hoffmann & Reyer 2013).…”

The tadpole of Chiasmocleis carvalhoi and the advertisement calls of three species of Chiasmocleis (Anura, Microhylidae) from the Atlantic rainforest of southeastern Brazil

“…The species groups emerging from the cluster analysis seem to reflect the correlation between body size and the acoustic properties of the calls, in which call duration and dominant frequency are positively and negatively correlated with body size, respectively (Zweifel 1968, Zimmerman 1983, Sullivan and Wagner 1988, Giacoma et al 1997. Moreover, in the syntopic species -C. atlantica and C. capixaba in Reserva Biológica União, RJ, and C. capixaba and C. schubarti in Reserva Biológica de Duas Bocas, ES -the members of species pairs possess distinct advertisement calls.…”

Advertisement calls of Cuban toads of the genus Bufo (Anura, Bufonidae)

“…The summary of the numerical information obtained from sound analysis is shown in Table 1. The range of temperature variation for all recordings never exceeded 4ºC, thus the influence of the air temperature on the acoustic features measured (Zweifel, 1968) should be minimal.…”