Abstract
Many species of animals, including man, face the formidable task of communicating in noisy environments. In this talk, I shall discuss the effects of anthropogenic (man-made) noise on the calling behavior of anuran amphibians. Moreover, the role of spectral, temporal, and spatial separation in minimizing masking by background noise will be examined. For example, presenting high-level, periodic (or aperiodic) tones at the males co-note frequency to males of the Puerto Rican treefrog, Eleutherodactylus coqui results in a clear shift in their calling pattern in an attempt to minimize acoustic overlap with the interfering playback stimulus. Amphibians also have a remarkable ability to shift their call timing in response to small intensity shifts in the background noise. Males of E. coqui are capable of reliably detecting a change in interfering tone intensity as small as 2–4 dB. Finally, I shall present behavioral evidence that anthropogenic noise may act as a strong selective force in sculpting the acoustic communication systems of several species of Old World frogs. Some techniques for visualizing sound interference will be discussed. [Supported by grants from the NIDCD (Grant No. DC-00222), and the UCLA Academic Senate (3501).]
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