Parasite defensive limb movements enhance acoustic signal attraction in male little torrent frogs
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- Hainan Normal University, China
- Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
Many animals rely on complex signals that target multiple senses to attract mates and repel rivals. These multimodal displays can however also attract unintended receivers, which can be an important driver of signal complexity. Despite being taxonomically widespread, we often lack insight into how multimodal signals evolve from unimodal signals and in particular what roles unintended eavesdroppers play. Here we assess whether the physical movements of parasite defense behavior increase the complexity and attractiveness of an acoustic sexual signal in the little torrent frog (Amolops torrentis). Calling males of this species often display limb movements in order to defend against blood-sucking parasites such as frog-biting midges that eavesdrop on their acoustic signal. Through mate choice tests we show that some of these midge-evoked movements influence female preference for acoustic signals. Our data suggest that midge-induced movements may be incorporated into a sexual display, targeting both hearing and vision in the intended receiver. Females may play an important role in incorporating these multiple components because they prefer signals which combine multiple modalities. Our results thus help to understand the relationship between natural and sexual selection pressure operating on signalers and how in turn this may influence multimodal signal evolution.
Data availability
Data used to generate the results are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmgzg.
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The data of parasite-induced and spontaneous displays in each limb movement for calling males, silent males and males that have females nearbyDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmgzg.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2022JDTD0026)
- Jianguo Cui
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31772464)
- Jianguo Cui
Youth Innovation Promotion Association (2012274)
- Jianguo Cui
CAS Light of West China" Program" (None)
- Jianguo Cui
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were approved by the management office of the Wuzhishan Nature Reserve and the Animal Care and Use Committee of the Chengdu Institute of Biology, CAS (CIB2017050004 & CIB2019060012).
Copyright
© 2022, Zhao et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Parasite defensive limb movements enhance acoustic signal attraction in male little torrent frogs
eLife 11:e76083.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76083
Further reading
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- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Recently we showed that limb movements associated with anti-parasite defenses can enhance acoustic signal attraction in male little torrent frogs (Amolops torrentis), which suggests a potential pathway for physical movements to become co-opted into mating displays (Zhao et al., 2022). Anderson et al. argue for alternative explanations of our results and provide a reanalysis of part of our data (Anderson et al., 2023). We acknowledge some of the points raised and provide an additional analysis in support of our hypothesis.
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- Ecology
Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) have been shown to engage in string-pulling behavior to access rewards. The objective of this study was to elucidate whether bumblebees display means-end comprehension in a string-pulling task. We presented bumblebees with two options: one where a string was connected to an artificial flower containing a reward and the other presenting an interrupted string. Bumblebees displayed a consistent preference for pulling connected strings over interrupted ones after training with a stepwise pulling technique. When exposed to novel string colors, bees continued to exhibit a bias towards pulling the connected string. This suggests that bumblebees engage in featural generalization of the visual display of the string connected to the flower in this task. If the view of the string connected to the flower was restricted during the training phase, the proportion of bumblebees choosing the connected strings significantly decreased. Similarly, when the bumblebees were confronted with coiled connected strings during the testing phase, they failed to identify and reject the interrupted strings. This finding underscores the significance of visual consistency in enabling the bumblebees to perform the task successfully. Our results suggest that bumblebees’ ability to distinguish between continuous strings and interrupted strings relies on a combination of image matching and associative learning, rather than means-end understanding. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the cognitive processes employed by bumblebees when tackling complex spatial tasks.
