Acoustic signal perception in a noisy habitat: lessons from synchronising insects

Acoustically communicating animals often have to cope with ambient noise that has the potential to interfere with the perception of conspecific signals. Here we use the synchronous display of mating signals in males of the tropical katydid Mecopoda elongata in order to assess the influence of nocturnal rainforest noise on signal perception. Loud background noise may disturb chorus synchrony either by masking the signals of males or by interaction of noisy events with the song oscillator. Phase-locked synchrony of males was studied under various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) using either native noise or the audio component of noise (<9 kHz). Synchronous entrainment was lost at a SNR of -3 dB when native noise was used, whereas with the audio component still 50% of chirp periods matched the pacer period at a SNR of -7 dB. Since the chirp period of solo singing males remained almost unaffected by noise, our results suggest that masking interference limits chorus synchrony by rendering conspecific signals ambiguous. Further, entrainment with periodic artificial signals indicates that synchrony is achieved by ignoring heterospecific signals and attending to a conspecific signal period. Additionally, the encoding of conspecific chirps was studied in an auditory neuron under the same background noise regimes.