Time and place affect the acoustic structure of frog advertisement calls

Acoustic communication signals are important for species recognition and mate attraction across numerous taxa. For instance, most of the thousands of species of frogs have a species-specific advertisement call that females use to localize and discriminate among potential mates. Thus, the acoustic structure of the advertisement call is critical for reproductive success. The acoustic structure of calls will generally diverge over evolutionary time and can be influenced by the calls of sympatric species. While many studies have shown the influence of geography on contemporary call variation in populations of frogs, no study has compared the acoustic structure of frog calls across many species to ask whether we can detect an influence of divergence time and overall geographic overlap on the differences in acoustic structure of species-typical calls that we observe now. To this end, we compared acoustic features of the calls of 225 species of frogs within 4 families. Furthermore, we used a behavioral assay from 1 species of frog to determine which acoustic features to prioritize in our large-scale analyses. We found evidence that both phylogeny (time) and geography (place) relate to advertisement call acoustics albeit with large variation in these relationships across the 4 families in the analysis. Overall, these results suggest that, despite the many ecological and evolutionary forces that influence call structure, the broad forces of time and place can shape aspects of advertisement call acoustics.