Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama.
Brain Behav Evol. 2022;97(3-4):140-150. doi: 10.1159/000521309. Epub 2021 Dec 3.
As species change through evolutionary time, the neurological and morphological structures that underlie behavioral systems typically remain coordinated. This is especially important for communication systems, in which these structures must remain coordinated both within and between senders and receivers for successful information transfer. The acoustic communication of anurans ("frogs") offers an excellent system to ask when and how such coordination is maintained, and to allow researchers to dissociate allometric effects from independent correlated evolution. Anurans constitute one of the most speciose groups of vocalizing vertebrates, and females typically rely on vocalizations to localize males for reproduction. Here, we compile and compare data on various aspects of auditory morphology, hearing sensitivity, and call-dominant frequency across 81 species of anurans. We find robust, phylogenetically independent scaling effects of body size for all features measured. Furthermore, after accounting for body size, we find preliminary evidence that morphological evolution beyond allometry can correlate with hearing sensitivity and dominant frequency. These data provide foundational results regarding constraints imposed by body size on communication systems and motivate further data collection and analysis using comparative approaches across the numerous anuran species.
随着物种在进化过程中的变化，行为系统的神经和形态结构通常仍然保持协调。这对于通讯系统尤为重要，因为这些结构必须在发送者和接收者内部和之间保持协调，才能成功传递信息。两栖动物（“青蛙”）的声学通讯提供了一个极好的系统，可以用来询问协调是如何以及何时保持的，并允许研究人员将异速生长的影响与独立的相关进化区分开来。两栖动物是发声脊椎动物中种类最多的一组，雌性通常依靠叫声来定位雄性进行繁殖。在这里，我们汇集并比较了 81 种两栖动物的听觉形态、听力敏感度和鸣叫主导频率等各个方面的数据。我们发现所有测量特征都存在稳健的、与进化无关的体型大小的比例效应。此外，在考虑到体型大小后，我们初步发现形态进化超出了异速生长与听力敏感度和主导频率之间存在相关性的证据。这些数据提供了关于体型对通讯系统施加的限制的基础结果，并激发了使用比较方法在众多的两栖动物物种中进行进一步的数据收集和分析。
