With hundreds of males calling at
the same time, how's a female to choose a mate? Like this.
Date: June 7, 2017
Source: University of Minnesota
You've been there: Trying to
carry on a conversation in a room so noisy that the background chatter
threatens to drown out the words you hear. Yet somehow your auditory system is
able to home in on the message being conveyed by the person you're talking
with. The secret to rising above the noise -- a dilemma known in the world of
sound science as "the cocktail party problem" -- turns out to lie in
its ability to discern patterns in the background noise and selectively ignore
such patterns, according to a new study published in Current Biology earlier
this month.
Frogs mating
Listening to a deafening chorus
of Cope's gray treefrogs on a spring evening, scientists have wondered: Do
female frogs use a similar strategy to pick important messages about potential
mates out of the cacophony? The chorus consists of the calls of countless
individual male frogs, each of which is conveying information about which
species it is and how fit it is -- with faster, longer calls indicating fitter
individuals. To ensure the best survival of their young, "the females have
to be able to tell the appropriate species and be able to choose a high-quality
male," says Norman Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of
Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. But how can they, when everyone is talking at
the same time?
Working with associate professor
Mark Bee and colleagues in EEB and the Department of Psychology, Lee has
figured out what traits of the background noise of frog choruses allow females to
tune out the hubbub and tune into the hubba-hubba -- with implications not only
for our understanding of frog ecology and evolution, but also for our ability
to help humans hear.
Lee knew from others' research
that humans are able to hear certain sounds better in noisy settings when the
background noise is "comodulated" -- meaning that the various
frequencies of sound it comprises vary in loudness together. Could the fact
that the background noise is comodulated be a key to the frogs' success? To
find out, he first built a model of the Cope's gray treefrog's ear and used it
to determine how this species may process the background chorus. He then
analyzed frog choruses and discovered that the chorus input indeed is
comodulated.
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