Association between Genetic and Bioacoustic Distances of Tettigoniidae Species (Orthoptera: Tettigonioidea) in the Northeast of China

Abstract

The association between acoustic signals and genetics is not fully understood as of yet. It is unclear whether the acoustic characters of insect calling songs are correlated with insect genetic divergence. Here, we analyzed the genetic distance using 16S rDNA and cytochrome b sequences and calculated acoustic distance by the intensity distribution histograms statistic on the spectrograms of calling songs. After the alignment, 510 bp of cytochrome b and 542 bp of 16S rDNA sequences were used to calculate the genetic pairwise distance. The Neighbor-Joining phylogenetic analysis of both sequences was generally concordant with taxonomy. For acoustic signals, the L1 norm distance was in the range of [0.133, 0.434], showing a good reflection of the “vocal print” of the species. Finally, based on the two genetic distance matrice and one acoustic matrix, a multiple regression analysis was performed. The cubic regression diagram formed an upward sloping surface, suggesting that the genetic distance was positively correlated with the acoustic distance. This study demonstrates that the evolution rate of mating signal is sufficient in accordance with the gene at an interspecies level in insect.