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Communication in a noisy environment: short-term acoustic adjustments and the underlying acoustic niche of a Neotropical stream-breeding frog

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Abstract

Acoustically active animals may show long- and short-term adaptations in acoustic traits for coping with ambient noise. Given the key role of calls in anurans’ life history, long- and short-term adaptations are expected in species inhabiting noisy habitats. However, to disentangle such adaptations is a difficult task, incipiently addressed for Neotropical frogs. We investigated if males of a stream-breeding frog (Crossodactylus schmidti) adjust call traits according to the background noise, and if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varies between call harmonics and along call notes. We measured sound pressure levels of calls and noise in the field and used a fine-scale acoustic analysis to describe the signal and noise structure and test for noise-related call adjustments. The multi-note harmonic call of C. schmidti greatly varied in the spectral structure, including a trend for increasing note amplitude along the call, a wide frequency bandwidth of the 2nd harmonic, a minor call frequency modulation due to a trend for increasing note frequency within the same harmonic, and a major call frequency modulation due to the variable location of the dominant harmonic along the call. Calls had significantly higher frequencies than the noise at the range of the 1st and the 2nd call harmonics, and significantly louder sound pressure than the noise at the range of all harmonics. Males emitted the majority of call notes showing positive SNR, and though males also emitted some notes with negative SNR, when a given harmonic was negative the other harmonics in the same note did not tend to be SNR-negative. Our results indicate that male C. schmidti show short-term acoustic adjustments that make the advertisement call effective for coping with the interference of the stream-generated noise. We suggest that the call spectral plasticity serves for coping with temporary changes in the background noise, whilst we also discuss the possibility that the redundant, harmonic-structured call may have evolved to diminish masking interference on the acoustic signal by the background noise. This is the first study to uncouple noise-related acoustic adjustments and putative long-term acoustic adaptations for a Hylodidae, providing insights on behavioral plasticity and signal evolution of stream-breeding frogs.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Camila Both, Cynthia Prado, Selvino Neckel de Oliveira, Sandro Santos and two anonymous referees for their reviews that further improved the manuscript. Thanks are also due to Doris Preininger for kindly discussing the bioacoustic procedure of signal-to-noise analysis, and to the staff of the Laboratório de Herpetologia – UFSM for their assistance in field activities. V.M.C. and S.I. thank CAPES for the doctoral fellowships and S.Z.C. is grateful to CNPq for the award of a research fellowship (No. 304929/2012-3). Activities in Turvo State Park were performed in accordance with the access licenses (Nos 133/2010 and 23/2011) issued by SEMA-RS.

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  1. Vinícius Matheus Caldart

    Present address: Departamento de Ecologia, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Rua do Matão, trav. 14, n° 321, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo, SP, 05508-900, Brazil

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós Graduação em Biodiversidade Animal, Centro de Ciências Naturais e Exatas, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria, RS, Brazil

    Vinícius Matheus Caldart, Samanta Iop & Sonia Zanini Cechin

  2. Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Campus Francisco Beltrão, Francisco Beltrão, PR, Brazil

    Rodrigo Lingnau

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  1. Vinícius Matheus Caldart
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Correspondence to Vinícius Matheus Caldart.

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Caldart, V.M., Iop, S., Lingnau, R. et al. Communication in a noisy environment: short-term acoustic adjustments and the underlying acoustic niche of a Neotropical stream-breeding frog. acta ethol 19, 151–162 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-016-0235-2

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