How male signaling intensity influences phonotaxis in virgin female Jamaican field crickets (Gryllus assimilis)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Understanding female mate preference is important for determining the strength and the direction of sexual trait evolution. Male signalling intensity is often an important predictor of mating success because higher intensity (louder) signallers are detectable at greater distances. However, if females are simultaneously more attracted to higher signalling intensities, then the potential fitness impacts of higher intensity signalling should be elevated beyond what would be expected from detection distance alone. Here we manipulated the signal intensity of cricket mate attraction signals to determine how female phonotaxis was influenced. We examined female phonotaxis using two common methodologies: spherical treadmills and open arenas. Both methodologies showed similar results, with females exhibiting highest phonotaxis towards loud (X̅+1 SD = 69 dB) mate attraction signals but showing reduced phonotaxis towards the loudest (X̅+2 SD = 77 dB) signals. Reduced phonotaxis towards supernormal stimuli may occur for several reasons including elevating the females’ perceived predation risk, invoking females’ acoustic startle response, or exceeding females’ perceptual limits.
Cite this as
2014. How male signaling intensity influences phonotaxis in virgin female Jamaican field crickets (Gryllus assimilis) PeerJ PrePrints 2:e324v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.324v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This is Part 2 of Karen Pacheco's MSc thesis. Part 1 was published in PeerJ in 2013 (https://peerj.com/articles/130/).
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Additional Information
Competing Interests
Susan M. Bertram serves as an academic editor on the PeerJ board.
Author Contributions
Susan M Bertram contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Karen Pacheco conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
Funding was provided to S.M.B. by a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant, the Ontario Research Fund, and Carleton University Research Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
