Behavioural tuning in a tropical amphibian along an altitudinal gradient

Abstract

Males of the coqui treefrog, Eleutherodactylus coqui, produce a distinct two-note ‘co-qui’ advertisement call from sunset to midnight throughout most of the year. Previous work established that both the spectrotemporal aspects of the call and the frequency of highest inner-ear sensitivity change with altitude above sea level. These variations are such that the frequency of the emitted co-note closely matches the frequency to which the inner ear is most sensitive. Given this parallel variation, we expected that the call-evoked behavioural response of male coqui treefrogs would also show an altitude dependence, and hypothesized that males would produce their most robust acoustical territorial response to advertisement calls that match calls from their own altitude. We tested this hypothesis in the field by studying the vocal response behaviour of coquis to playbacks of synthetic, altitude-dependent conspecific calls, and indeed found that the most robust vocal responses were obtained using stimuli closely matching the calls from the same altitude.