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The Effects of Body Size on the Evolution of the Amphibian Middle Ear

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The Evolutionary Biology of Hearing

Abstract

Body size can be an important determinant of many features of animals (Schmidt-Nielsen 1984; Calder 1984). This chapter will examine how body size may guide the evolution of mechanisms of acoustic reception in amphibians. Amphibians are a good group for such an analysis because they possess a diversity of systems responsive to acoustic signals (besides just the standard tympanic middle ear) and many aspects of these systems appear to be size dependent. This chapter will review what is known about acoustic reception in amphibians, will consider size-related aspects of the systems involved, and will discuss how evolutionary changes in body size may have affected the evolution of these systems. Much attention will be focused on the role body size may play in a common evolutionary trend in amphibians, namely the reduction and loss of a tympanic middle ear. A major aim of this chapter is to set forward hypotheses about the relationship between body size and acoustic function; because of a lack of pertinent data in many cases, this is about the best that can be accomplished at this time.

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Authors
  1. Thomas E. Hetherington
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Louisiana State University Medical Center, New Orleans, LA, 70112, USA

    Douglas B. Webster

  2. Department of Zoology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Arthur N. Popper

  3. Parmly Hearing Institute and Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60626, USA

    Richard R. Fay

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

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Hetherington, T.E. (1992). The Effects of Body Size on the Evolution of the Amphibian Middle Ear. In: Webster, D.B., Popper, A.N., Fay, R.R. (eds) The Evolutionary Biology of Hearing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2784-7_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2784-7_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7668-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-2784-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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