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How females of chirping and trilling field crickets integrate the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of male acoustic signals during decision making

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Abstract

In crickets acoustic communication serves mate selection. Female crickets have to perceive and integrate male cues relevant for mate choice while confronted with several different signals in an acoustically diverse background. Overall female decisions are based on the attractiveness of the temporal pattern (informative about the ‘what’) and on signal intensity (informative about the ‘where’) of male calling songs. Here, we investigated how the relevant cues for mate choice are integrated during the decision process by females of five different species of chirping and trilling field crickets. Using a behavioral design, female preferences in no-choice and choice situations for male calling songs differing in pulse rate, modulation depth, intensities, chirp/trill arrangements and temporal shifts were examined. Sensory processing underlying decisions in female field crickets is rather similar as combined evidence suggested that incoming song patterns were analyzed separately by bilaterally paired networks for pattern attractiveness and pattern intensity. A downstream gain control mechanism leads to a weighting of the intensity cue by pattern attractiveness. While remarkable differences between species were observed with respect to specific processing steps, closely related species exhibited more similar preferences than did more distantly related species.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Bernhard Ronacher for critical and constructive discussions about the data analyses and the manuscript. We appreciate Elisa Becker, Pascal Kolja Haß, Anne Görlitz, Daria Ivanova and Ailyn Yilmaz for the help with some of the experiments. All applicable international, national and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [he2812/4-1].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Behavioral Physiology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstraße 43, 10115, Berlin, Germany

    Eileen Gabel & R. Matthias Hennig

  2. Department of Biology, California State University Northridge, Northridge, CA, USA

    David A. Gray

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  1. Eileen Gabel
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  2. David A. Gray
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Correspondence to Eileen Gabel.

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Gabel, E., Gray, D.A. & Matthias Hennig, R. How females of chirping and trilling field crickets integrate the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of male acoustic signals during decision making. J Comp Physiol A 202, 823–837 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-016-1124-x

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