So as it turns out male Spring peepers not only make calls to attract female to mate with, but they also have an aggression call which lets other male frogs know that they are in close proximity with rivaling males that may interfere with one anothers breeding success. The authors of this study believed that the plasticity in signaling was based on social context. Two factors involved in this context were (1) the type of signals produced by new nearby neighbors and (2) the persistence with which new neighbors produced those signal types.
This is interesting when considering how people are usually thought to consider frogs as simple and not able to communicate with each other about differences in their local environment. This study shows that male frogs are able to tell how much competition they have by what kinds of calls are being projected in their local chorus and at what frequency these calls are being displayed in ratio to one another. This goes to show that frogs during mate attracting periods are able to communicate about details that are more than just the attraction of a likely mate.
Context-dependent plasticity of aggressive signalling in a dynamic social environment
Jeremy Ross
Nice. How does this communication work between the males? When one male hears one of these calls and sends a call, how is it decided who stays in the area and who leaves?
ReplyDelete-Posted by Sarah Benjamin
I have heard this about frogs before. Do you know what the basic difference between the agression call and the mating call is? Do the bigger, more fit males have a lower or louder call? There must also be a strong cost/benefit relationship here. Certain calls must be more likely to attract predators. It'd be interesting to find out more about this.
ReplyDelete-Jillian O'Keefe
This article is very interesting. I didn't know that frogs could communicate like that. What kind of experiments did they run? Did they used playback experiments at all? What kind of species of frogs did they run these experiments on?
ReplyDelete-Samantha Babcock