Stridulatory Sound-Production and Its Function in Females of the Cicada Subpsaltria yangi

Abstract

Acoustic behavior plays a crucial role in many aspects of cicada biology, such as reproduction and intrasexual competition. Although female sound production has been reported in some cicada species, acoustic behavior of female cicadas has received little attention. In cicada Subpsaltria yangi, the females possess a pair of unusually well-developed stridulatory organs. Here, sound production and its function in females of this remarkable cicada species were investigated. We revealed that the females could produce sounds by stridulatory mechanism during pair formation, and the sounds were able to elicit both acoustic and phonotactic responses from males. In addition, the forewings would strike the body during performing stridulatory sound-producing movements, which generated impact sounds. Acoustic playback experiments indicated that the impact sounds played no role in the behavioral context of pair formation. This study provides the first experimental evidence that females of a cicada species can generate sounds by stridulatory mechanism. We anticipate that our results will promote acoustic studies on females of other cicada species which also possess stridulatory system.

Genetic divergence, population differentiation and phylogeography of the cicada Subpsaltria yangi based on molecular and acoustic data: an example of the early stage of speciation?

“…This rare species was originally reported from the foothills of the Qinling Mountains [33]. It was thought to be extinct after intensive field investigations in recent decades [36]. After the discovery of a population of S. yangi from the Helan Mountains in June 2011, a few more populations were discovered using our special acoustic playback method [35].…”

“…Tainaka et al [101] illustrated that frequent speciation or extinction may occur in communities undergoing rapid environmental change. Habitat fragmentation and destruction of host-plants by human activities, particularly agricultural practices, is a critical threat to populations of S. yangi [36]. Therefore, assessment of habitat conditions and conservation needs of this rare species should be conducted.…”

“…Previous study has indicated that S. yangi males produce both timbal and stridulatory sounds for intraspecific communication [36]. Therefore, the frequency domain and duration of both timbal and stridulatory sounds of the four sampled populations were compared.…”

Sound production in male and female corkwing wrasses and its relation to visual behaviour

“…Outside of birds, female sound production has been found in a diverse range of taxa, e.g. cicadas (Luo and Wei 2015), frogs (Roy 1997;Emerson and Boyd 1999), various monkey species (Sekulic 1983;Geissmann 2002;Townsend et al 2008), elk bugles (Feighny et al 2006), and fish (Ladich and Schleinzer 2020;Liesch and Ladich 2020).…”

Cicada Swarm Optimization: A New Method for Optimizing Persistent Problems

“…When a higher concentration of odor is detected on one side of the antenna, the insect will rotate in the same direction, otherwise, it will turn to the other side. According to this simple principle, cicada can effectively find food [25][26]. With the continuous deepening of the experiment, we found that the performance of the CSO algorithm in dealing with high-dimensional functions is not very satisfactory, and the iterative result is very dependent on the initial position of the cockroach.…”