Frogs Have Rules: Selective Attention Algorithms Regulate Chorusing in Physalaemus pustulosus (Leptodactylidae)
By Michael D Greenfield, A. Rand. 2000
110 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In various acoustic insects and frogs, females preferentially orient towards the leading of two or more males' advertisement signals that occur closely in time. Such preferences in receivers have apparently selected for timing mechanisms whereby male signallers actively refrain from calling immediately following the onset of a neighbour's call and thereby increase their production of leading calls. However, indiscriminate application of this inhibitory mechanism to all neighbours might severely reduce a male's calling rate, particularly in high density. Consequently, mechanisms of selective attention to only a subset of signalling neighbours are expected. Female Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) exhibit strong preferences for leading male calls, and males refrain from calling immediately following a neighbour. Four-loudspeaker playback experiments demonstrated that males do selectively apply this inhibitory mechanism to only a subset of close signalling neighbours. Selective attention is regulated by a combination of sliding threshold and fixed number rules: (i) Attend to the loudest (nearest) conspecific neighbour and those additional ones whose calls are within 6–8 dB of the loudest one; (ii) attend to only two neighbours in total when the calls are weak or the second one is much farther than the first; (iii) attend to three neighbours when the calls are loud or all neighbours are approximately equidistant. The means by which such plasticity may be achieved and its potential adaptiveness are discussed.
Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9d30d2f526d388754172ceb0dc1c18e8eeff744
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Citations in the corpus
- Mechanisms and Evolution of Communal Sexual Displays in Arthropods and Anurans (2005, unknown): “These several possibilities were investigated in the Túngara frog Physalaemus pustulosus, another species with a strong precedence effect in female orientation, using the four‐ loudspeaker arrangement (Greenfield and Rand, 2000) (Fig.”
- Acoustic interactions among male gray treefrogs, Hyla versicolor, in a chorus setting (2002, background): “…interference with their nearest or loudest members of the chorus, is an option that has been documented in some anurans (Brush and Narins 1989; Schwartz 1993; Boatright-Horowitz et al. 2000; Greenfield and Rand 2000) and chorusing orthopteran insects (Minckley et al. 1995; Snedden et al. 1998).”
- The Behavioral Ecology of Anuran Communication (2007, background): “Greenfield and Rand (2000) described similar behavior in Physalaemus pustulosus and further demonstrated that the “rules” frogs use to delimit their zone of selective attention are flexible enough to accommodate the dynamic nature of frog choruses.”