Meeting Abstract

73.3  Wednesday, Jan. 6  More than one type of tenure: anthropogenic noise affects individual-level and chorus-level tenure in the frog Dendropsophus microcephalus KAISER, Kristine*; ALLOUSH, Menemsha; JONES, Robin M.; MARTINEAU, Katherine; MARCZAK, Susanne; OLIVA, Mark V.; NARINS, Peter M.; Univ. of California, Los Angeles kristinekaiser@gmail.com

For species which communicate acoustically, calls are crucial for a variety of interactions, including mate attraction. As a result, many species have developed mechanisms to overcome noise in their habitat. However, as habitats become increasingly degraded and fragmented, anthropogenic noise becomes unavoidable. How animals overcome novel exogenous noise is not well understood. In many frogs, the main predictor of mating success is number of nights at a chorus. However, we propose that chorus tenure can be thought of as having two components, an individual-level and a chorus-level component. We tested the hypothesis that anthropogenic noise decreases chorus tenure at both individual-levels and chorus-levels in the New World treefrog Dendropsophus microcephalus. We marked and monitored frogs naïve to anthropogenic noise at two ponds over 45 nights. We broadcast engine noise to frogs at the experimental pond; at the control pond, no noise was played. Frogs at the experimental pond exhibited a decrease in number of days they were at the pond, and in time participating in chorusing on a given night relative to control pond. Because female frogs tend to come to aggregations of calling males late in the evening, these results have serious implications for reproductive success in frogs. We suggest that anthropogenic noise may play a role in amphibian declines.