1975/05/23 by Robert S. Oldham, R. S. Oldham, H. Carl Gerhardt · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Amphibian and Reptile Biology #Plant and animal studies #Animal Behavior and Reproduction
paper · doi:10.2307/1442880
The reproductive behavior of two broadly sympatric, interfertile treefrogs, Hyla cinerea and Hyla gratiosa, was studied. Field observations corroborated the conclusions of a previous study (Mecham, 1960) regarding the incompleteness of ecological and temporal isolation and the significance of the species difference in calling position. Both species have more than one kind of call but discrimination experiments showed that in each species, one call is most important as a mate attractant. In single-stimulus experiments some females of both species responded to the calls of the other species. However, in discrimination experiments females of both species responded almost exclusively to conspecific mating calls when those of the other species were equally accessible. Females of H. cinerea also chose the pulsed, presumably territorial calls of conspecific males over the mating calls of H. gratiosa. Our analyses of the spectra of the calls of the two species differ significantly from those previously published in that two distinct spectral peaks are found. The two peaks have species-specific locations and are important for call recognition by female frogs.