Variation of vibrational communication signals in animals depends on trait duration

Abstract

In the recent years, vibrational communication signals have become more and more prominent in research—often, characteristics of signals are described for several closely related species or populations of the same species, using means and standard deviations. Phenotypic variation in vibratory communication signals can be measured and compared using the coefficient of variation, which is supposed to be independent of trait size. However, it has been shown that the coefficients of variation of acoustic (airborne sound) male courtship signals in insects and anurans increase with signal duration in accordance with a power law. To examine whether this pattern is also true for vibrational communication signals, we used original data for Mantophasmatodea and reviewed the literature for published data on arthropods, anurans and mammals. The relationship between trait variability and duration is surprisingly stable for all investigated biotremology data and similar to the relationships found for airborne sound courtship signals. This study adds towards our knowledge about a general pattern for temporal variability of communication signals.

Testing the evolutionary driving forces on display signal complexity in an Asian agamid lizard

“…Display signal complexity was measured at both component and display levels. At the component level, we calculated the coe cient of variation (CV) for each variable, which is the standard deviation divided by the mean (Eberhard et al 2018). At the display level, we calculated the display duration and estimated the component change rate per second by dividing the number of component change against display duration.…”