Journal
HORMONES AND BEHAVIOR
Volume 128, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2020.104891
Keywords
Arginine vasotocin; AVT; Anuran; Frog; Physalaemus (=Engystomops) pustulosus; Ttingara frog; Animal communication; Advertisement call
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation grant [NSF IBN 9816564]
- Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris
- Edgewood College
Ask authors/readers for more resources
AVT influences male responses to acoustic signals in Ttingara frogs, affecting motivation to call and production of vocalizations, but does not appear to alter the salience of frequency modulation in recognizing and responding to stimuli.
Arginine vasotocin (AVT) and its homolog arginine vasopressin (AVP) modulate social behavior, including social communication. In anuran amphibians, male-male competition and female mate choice rely heavily on acoustic signaling. Behavioral experiments show that AVT influences motivation to call and vocal production. It may also influence how males process and respond to socially relevant auditory stimuli, but few studies have explored this possibility in this taxon. Ttingara frogs produce a whine that is used for species recognition; in competition with other males they append one or more attractive chucks to the whine. Frequency modulation in the whine is an important cue for recognizing conspecifics, and gating of conspecific signals begins in the auditory midbrain. We used dynamic playback experiments to investigate the effects of exogenous AVT on males' responses to stimuli with species-typical and altered frequency modulation. We used avoidance of call overlap as evidence that a male recognizes a stimulus as salient and the production of attractive chucks as evidence of his competitive response to a proximate rival. We used call rate, whine duration, and whine frequency as measures of motivation and motor production. Males responded selectively to a stimulus with species-typical frequency modulation. Following treatment with AVT, they increased call rate and altered whines and chucks in a way that suggests increased air flow during the whine. We did not, however, find evidence that treatment with AVT alters the salience of frequency modulation in recognizing and responding to acoustic signals, at least for the stimuli used in this study.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available