Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 56, Issue 6, December 1998, Pages 1509-1516
Animal Behaviour

Regular Article
Evoked vocal response in male túngara frogs: pre-existing biases in male responses?

https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1998.0928Get rights and content

Abstract

Female túngara frogs,Physalaemus pustulosus, are preferentially attracted to a whine-chuck advertisement call over a simple whine (Rand & Ryan 1981,Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie,57,209–214). Females also show phonotactic preferences for the whine when a number of other heterospecific or artificial stimuli are added to it, and these calls tend to be as attractive to females as a whine-chuck (Ryan & Rand 1990,Evolution,44,305–314). We tested male túngara frogs with the same suite of stimuli using evoked vocal responses as a bioassay to examine sexual differences in responses to signal variation. A whine-chuck elicited greater responses from males than a whine-only. Artificial and heterospecific stimuli that enhanced call attractiveness to females also elicited greater vocal responses from males and, as with females, the effects of these stimuli were similar to that of the whine-chuck. Thus, in both sexes there are pre-existing biases for a suite of stimuli not produced by conspecifics.

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      Males responding to the experimental stimuli called antiphonally with the heterospecific/ancestral calls as they do when interacting acoustically with other males in nature (Greenfield & Rand 2000). We use the evoked vocal responses as an indicator of call recognition, a common approach in anurans (e.g. Ryan & Rand 1998; Bee 2003). Here we evaluated the calling response to nonconspecific calls in male túngara frogs and assumed that if a signal elicited a response from a male, he mistakenly identified the stimulus as a conspecific call.

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      The conflict over mating optima can drive rapid evolutionary change. According to the “chase‐away” model, preexisting sensory bias (Basolo, 1990, 1995; Ryan and Rand, 1998) in females selects for some form of display trait that enhances male attractiveness (Holland and Rice, 1998). The female response to the most attractive males is to mate in a suboptimal manner, for example by increasing their mating rate.

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    L. Real

    f1

    Correspondence: M. J. Ryan, Department of Zoology, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712, U.S.A. (email:[email protected]).

    f2

    A. S. Rand is at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Bailboa, Panama.

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