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Cover picture: During the breeding season, male midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) build nests under rocky shelters along the intertidal and subtidal zones of the western coast of the United States and Canada. Midshipman fish have two male reproductive morphs known as parental, type I males, and sneaker, type II males. Type I males build and guard nests and acoustically court females; whereas type II males neither build nests nor acoustically court females; instead they sneak spawn. Shown here is a nest containing (top to bottom) a sneaker male, female, parental male, and sneaker male. Also shown near the bottom are newly hatched fry that are attached to a small rock inside the nest by an adhesive disk at the base of the yolk sac. Parental males "sing" to attract females to their nest, producing long duration, multiharmonic mate calls known as hums that often overlap with a neighbor's hum. Concurrent hums with small differences in fundamental frequency (F0) interfere to produce beat waveforms characterized by amplitude and phase modulations at the difference frequencies (dFs) of their harmonic components. Auditory midbrain units temporally code the dF of acoustic beats composed of two tones near the F0s and with dFs comparable to those of natural beats. For details, see the article by Bodnar and Bass, in this issue (pp. 7553-7564). Photograph by Margaret Marchaterre (Cornell University).
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