Abstract:
In most anuran species males advertise calls to attract females. In a natural environment these calls can be masked by the natural background noise. We investigated in the cricket frog the threshold at which females are no longer able to locate a male call, when the call was embedded in noise. We used artificial white noise and a natural frog chorus as background noise and embedded male calls at a different call/noise ratio in the noise. In phonotaxis experiments we played the noise versus the call embedded in noise. We tested females 9om a population living in an open grassland. Females responded to masked calls even when the call and the noise were of the same loudness. We will discuss the results in relation to other studies.