The Complex History of Genome Duplication and Hybridization in North American Gray Treefrogs

Booker, William W; Gerhardt, H. Carl; Lemmon, Alan R.; Ptacek, Margaret B.; Hassinger, Alyssa T B; Schul, Johannes; Lemmon, Emily Moriarty

doi:10.1093/molbev/msab316

Cited by 17 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…The gray treefrogs form a cryptic species complex consisting of two closely related species, the diploid Cope's gray treefrog, Hyla chrysoscelis, and the tetraploid eastern gray treefrog, Hyla versicolor. Current evidence suggests that H. versicolor evolved as a result of autopolyploidization from a now extinct lineage of H. chrysoscelis (Bogart et al, 2020;Booker et al, 2021). The two species are morphologically indistinguishable and breed at the same times and places across much of their shared geographic range.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural basis of acoustic species recognition in a cryptic species complex

Gupta

Alluri

Rose

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Sexual traits that promote species recognition are important drivers of reproductive isolation, especially among closely related species. Identifying neural processes that shape species differences in recognition is crucial for understanding the causal mechanisms of reproductive isolation. Temporal patterns are salient features of sexual signals widely used in species recognition by several taxa, including anurans. Recent advances in our understanding of temporal processing by the anuran auditory system provide an opportunity to investigate the neural basis of species-specific recognition. The anuran inferior colliculus (IC) consists of neurons that are selective for temporal features of calls. Of potential relevance are auditory neurons known as interval-counting neurons (ICNs) that are often selective for the pulse rate of conspecific advertisement calls. Here, we tested the hypothesis that ICNs mediate acoustic species recognition by exploiting the known differences in temporal selectivity in two cryptic species of gray treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis and Hyla versicolor). We examined the extent to which the threshold number of pulses required to elicit behavioral responses from females and neural responses from ICNs was similar within each species but potentially different between the two species. In support of our hypothesis, we found that a species difference in behavioral pulse number thresholds closely matched the species difference in neural pulse number thresholds. However, this relationship held only for ICNs that exhibited band-pass tuning for conspecific pulse rates. Together, these findings suggest that differences in temporal processing of a subset of ICNs provide a mechanistic explanation for reproductive isolation between two cryptic treefrog species.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural basis of acoustic species recognition in a cryptic species complex

Gupta

Alluri

Rose

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…The second appendage type was a heterospecific appendage; this consisted of an abbreviated synthetic H. versicolor call (four pulses, total duration 165 ms; electronic supplementary material, figure S1). This appendage type was chosen because H. versicolor is a direct descendent of an ancestral lineage of H. chrysoscelis , and thus its calls, and auditory processing, evolved from ancestral H. chrysoscelis [37]. While H. chrysoscelis individuals are overall less responsive to H. versicolor calls [38], given the species’ close evolutionary relationship to H. versicolor , we considered it plausible that there may nevertheless be hidden biases for complex calls including some H. versicolor pulses.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensory biases in response to novel complex acoustic signals in male and female grey treefrogs, Hyla chrysoscelis

Reichert

Hera

2022

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The sensory bias hypothesis proposes that female preferences for male sexual signalling traits evolved in contexts other than mating. Individuals of both sexes may experience similar selection pressures in these contexts; thus males may have similar biases to females for variation in signal traits. We tested this prediction in the grey treefrog, Hyla chrysoscelis , in which males produce simple advertisement calls, but females are more attracted to certain novel complex stimuli. We recorded males' responses to playbacks of both simple advertisement calls and complex calls consisting of the advertisement call with an acoustic appendage (filtered noise, or heterospecific call pulses) either leading or following the call. We tested females’ preferences for the same stimuli in phonotaxis tests. We found evidence for a sensory bias in both sexes: males gave more aggressive calls in response to complex stimuli and females sometimes preferred complex over simple calls. These biases were not universal and depended on both temporal order and appendage characteristics, but how these effects manifested differed between the sexes. Ultimately, our approach of studying biases of both sexes in response to novel mating signals will shed light on the origin of mating preferences, and the mechanisms by which sensory biases operate.

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“…Wild-caught gravid females of the western H. chrysoscelis lineage (Booker et al 2022) were used as subjects for this study. All subjects were captured in amplexus at night (2200-0100 h) between mid-May and early July in 2018, 2019, and 2021 from wetlands at the Carver Park Reserve (Carver County, MN, USA), Richardson Nature Center (Hennepin County, MN, USA), and Tamarack Nature Center (Ramsey County, MN, USA).…”

Section: Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals

Gupta

Bee

2022

Preprint

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Noisy social environments constrain human speech intelligibility in two primary ways: spectro-temporal overlap between signals and noise reduces speech audibility (energetic masking) and noise interferes with processing the informative features of otherwise audible speech (informational masking). To date, informational masking has not been investigated in studies of vocal communication in nonhuman animals, even though their behavioral decisions frequently depend on extracting information from vocalizations in noisy aggregations. In this study of a treefrog, in which females chose mates in noisy breeding choruses, we investigated whether informational masking can disrupt the processing of signal information in the contexts of species recognition and sexual selection. We observed significant reductions in response to the vocalizations of a potential mate when they were broadcast concurrently with other biologically relevant sounds designed to reduce or eliminate energetic masking. These effects were more pronounced when competing sounds were present in a particularly salient frequency range for processing vocalizations. Among responsive subjects, however, performance in signal recognition and discrimination tasks remained largely unchanged. These results confirm that informational masking is a general communication problem among humans and other animals and suggest it may be a crucial yet understudied source of selection shaping the evolution of animal communication.

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The Complex History of Genome Duplication and Hybridization in North American Gray Treefrogs

Cited by 17 publications

References 107 publications

Neural basis of acoustic species recognition in a cryptic species complex

Neural basis of acoustic species recognition in a cryptic species complex

Sensory biases in response to novel complex acoustic signals in male and female grey treefrogs, Hyla chrysoscelis

Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals

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