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A Remarkable Progress on the Study of Acoustic Communication in the Concave-eared Frog

Author: Scientific Administration Office of IBP Update time: 2009-09-09

On 7 May 2008, Nature, the world's leading scientific journal, informed Jun-Xian Shen, a professor of neurobiology at the Institute of Biophysics and the team leader, "Your paper 'Ultrasonic frogs show hyperacute phonotaxis to female courtship calls' has now been scheduled for Advance Online Publication (AOP) on www.nature.com/natureon 11 May at 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern time."

Shen and his team published a paper in Nature on 16 March, 2006 and revealed that the Chinese frog, Odorrana tormota, a nocturnal tree-dweller in the noisy environment of rushing streams, have been found to possess extraordinary vocal and localization skills, comparable to dolphins, elephants and humans. A paper online in Nature this week presents new findings on the study.

Sound communication plays a vital role in frog reproduction, in which vocal advertisement is generally the domain of males. Females are typically silent, but in a few anuran species they can produce a feeble reciprocal call or rapping sounds during courtship. Although females of O. tormota have an unusually well-developed vocal production system, it is unclear whether or not they produce calls or are only passive partners in a communication system dominated by males.

Jun-Xian Shen and colleagues recorded the vocalizations of female frogs in a quiet, darkened room using an ultrasonic microphone linked up to a computer. They found that, just before ovulating, female frogs emit short, high-frequency ultrasonic signals distinct from the males' advertisement calls. They then played back the female calls to examine the response of the male frogs, and found that they both increased their calling activity and approached the source of the noise. On hearing the female call, a male usually oriented his body and made a long-distance hop towards the loudspeaker with remarkable precision of one or two degrees. The localization accuracy of O. tormota is all the more remarkable in light their small head size, and suggests an additional selection advantage of high frequency hearing beyond the ability to avoid masking by ambient noise. That rivals the performance of vertebrates with the highest localization acuity - owls, dolphins, elephants and humans.

New work analyses the ultrasonic mating calls of the female frog Odorrana tormota to reveal a surprisingly well-developed acoustic communication system, which is an adaptation to the noisy environment of rushing streams, as a method of unambiguous communication in the presence of their noisy habitat.

These are a remarkable progress on the study of acoustic communication in the concave-eared frog.

 

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