Labra Antonieta, Reyes-Olivares Claudio, Moreno-Gómez Felipe N, Velásquez Nelson A, Penna Mario, Delano Paul H, Narins Peter M
Department of Biosciences Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) University of Oslo Oslo Norway.
Programa de Fisiología y Biofísica Instituto de Ciencias Biomédicas Facultad de Medicina Universidad de Chile Santiago de Chile Chile.
Ecol Evol. 2021 Dec 14;11(24):18633-18650. doi: 10.1002/ece3.8469. eCollection 2021 Dec.
Effective communication requires a match among signal characteristics, environmental conditions, and receptor tuning and decoding. The degree of matching, however, can vary, among others due to different selective pressures affecting the communication components. For evolutionary novelties, strong selective pressures are likely to act upon the signal and receptor to promote a tight match among them. We test this prediction by exploring the coupling between the acoustic signals and auditory sensitivity in , the Weeping lizard, the only one of more than 285 species that vocalizes. Individuals emit distress calls that convey information of predation risk to conspecifics, which may respond with antipredator behaviors upon hearing calls. Specifically, we explored the match between spectral characteristics of the distress calls and the tympanic sensitivities of two populations separated by more than 700 km, for which previous data suggested variation in their distress calls. We found that populations differed in signal and receptor characteristics and that this signal variation was explained by population differences in body size. No precise match occurred between the communication components studied, and populations differed in the degree of such correspondence. We suggest that this difference in matching between populations relates to evolutionary processes affecting the Weeping lizard distress calls.
有效的通信需要信号特征、环境条件以及受体调谐和解码之间相互匹配。然而，匹配程度可能会有所不同，这在一定程度上是由于影响通信组件的不同选择压力所致。对于进化上的新奇事物，强大的选择压力可能会作用于信号和受体，以促使它们之间紧密匹配。我们通过探究哭泣蜥蜴（在285多种发声物种中唯一的一种）的声学信号与听觉敏感性之间的耦合来检验这一预测。个体发出遇险叫声，向同种个体传达捕食风险信息，同种个体听到叫声后可能会做出反捕食行为。具体而言，我们探究了相距700多公里的两个种群的遇险叫声频谱特征与鼓膜敏感性之间的匹配情况，此前的数据表明它们的遇险叫声存在差异。我们发现，两个种群在信号和受体特征方面存在差异，且这种信号差异可以用体型的种群差异来解释。在所研究的通信组件之间未出现精确匹配，且种群在这种对应程度上也存在差异。我们认为，种群之间这种匹配差异与影响哭泣蜥蜴遇险叫声的进化过程有关。
