On the vocal repertoire of the monkey frog Phyllomedusa venusta: distress call and the presumed non-existing advertisement call

Abstract

ABSTRACT The anuran advertisement call has been widely used in taxonomic and evolutionary studies due to its essential role in species-specific recognition. For a long time, it has been presumed that P. venusta did not emit mating calls. Here, we observed the entire vocal activity period of P. venusta over the night and recorded male calls and a female distress call. We recognized and described a single male call type, identified as the advertisement call. This call has an extremely low timbre, and it is composed of a single or a sequence of pulsed notes. The multi-noted calls were usually emitted in intrasexual agonistic contexts. Although both call duration and note number have a high coefficient of variation values, they are linearly correlated, so they should be acting as a single independent variable in the P. venusta calls. As expected, the distress call is longer and with a higher timbre than the advertisement call. Interspecific comparisons were made based on the ratio between advertisement call dominant frequency (DF) and body size. This ratio is similar to those of the species of the P. tarsius group.