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.
Highlights
Acoustic signaling is a widespread form of communication and occurs in vertebrates, and in arthropods and even in plants [1,2,3,4]
We explored the possibility of stridulatory sound production by S. yangi females
We showed that females of S. yangi were capable of producing sounds with their stridulatory organs
Summary
Acoustic signaling is a widespread form of communication and occurs in vertebrates, and in arthropods and even in plants [1,2,3,4]. Acoustic communication is used in different behavioral contexts, such as intra-sexual competition, inter-sexual interactions, and territorial defense [2,5,6]. Sound-based communication plays a vital role in reproduction in a diverse range of taxa (e.g., frogs and insects), in which acoustic advertisement is generally the domain of males [2,6]. The number and kind of communicative signals in the repertoire of an animal species depend on the complexity of its life activities [7]. Different acoustic properties of communication signals potentially encode different kinds of biologically significant information such as sex, dominance status and physical condition [8]. Sound-producing behavior has evolved in diverse arachnid and insect groups. Many species of spiders can produce sounds by stridulatory mechanism, and 12 different types of stridulatory
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