Spatio-Temporal Dynamics in Collective Frog Choruses Examined by Mathematical Modeling and Field Observations

Abstract

This paper reports theoretical and experimental studies on spatio-temporal dynamics in the choruses of male Japanese tree frogs. First, we theoretically model their calling times and positions as a system of coupled mobile oscillators. Numerical simulation of the model as well as calculation of the order parameters show that the spatio-temporal dynamics exhibits bistability between two-cluster antisynchronization and wavy antisynchronization, by assuming that the frogs are attracted to the edge of a simple circular breeding site. Second, we change the shape of the breeding site from the circle to rectangles including a straight line, and evaluate the stability of two-cluster and wavy antisynchronization. Numerical simulation shows that two-cluster antisynchronization is more frequently observed than wavy antisynchronization. Finally, we recorded frog choruses at an actual paddy field using our sound-imaging method. Analysis of the video demonstrated a consistent result with the aforementioned simulation: namely, two-cluster antisynchronization was more frequently realized.

Interactive rhythms across species: the evolutionary biology of animal chorusing and turn‐taking

“…Discourse analysis of corpora of recorded interactions and neuroimaging 11 Acoustic analyses of recordings, playback experiments, and so on 35,37,49 (or lacks a neural forward model 57,58 ). In humans, sensory predictions of one's own motor actions are used to attenuate the sensory effects of a movement (i.e., forward model) 57 so to better perceive external stimuli.…”

“…Relative phase of individual signal onsets with respect to the signals of other individuals 31,37,45 Function Relative communicative (proximate) function of two adjacent turns 11 Evolutionary function(s) of interactive timing 31,35 Group Coordination between two individuals 46 Emerging coordination patterns across two or more individuals 8,26,49…”

“…40,74,90 This mapping is complex, nonlinear, and a potential subject for exciting future research. It must include at least four explanatory levels, illustrating (1) how neural processes occur within an individual nervous system (e.g., oscillations, predictive coding, and climbing neural activity [94][95][96][97][98] ); (2) possibly supporting different cognitive mechanisms; 13,14,30,40,60,74 (3) which result in a range of individual timing patterns that can be measured behaviorally; 12,37,45,46,49 and that (4) shape and are shaped by interindividual interaction. 14,39,71,98…”

Synchronization of mobile chaotic oscillator networks

“…Although synchronization in the complex networks has been a) fujiwara@csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp intensively studied mainly so far with fixed topology, 16,17 many examples where synchronization of mobile elements plays a crucial role have been reported recently, e.g., chemotaxis, 18 mobile ad hoc networks, 19 wireless sensor networks, 7 the expression of segmentation clock genes, 20,21 and the acoustic communication of frogs. 22 Theoretically, the analysis of time dependent network topology is quite difficult and at the same time very challenging, and only few results have been reported so far. To our knowledge, the first attempt of a detailed analytical treatment was done by Skufca and Bollt, 9 who introduced the concept of the moving neighborhood networks and proposed the stability analysis based on the eigenvalues of the moving time average of the Laplacian matrices.…”

Echo Behavior in Large Populations of Chemical Oscillators

“…[4] is of particular interest because it is potentially applicable in a very general setting relevant to often-encountered situations of many coupled oscillators. This includes applications in biology (e.g., in collections of oscillating yeast cells [11]), ecology (e.g., groups of periodically flashing fireflies [12,13] or croaking frogs [14]), mechanics (e.g., many coupled metronomes [15]), etc. Thus, all these types of systems should be amenable to experimental realization of echo phenomena.…”