Synopses & Reviews
Walk near woods or water on any spring or summer night and you will hear a bewildering chorus of frog, toad, and insect calls. How are these calls produced? What messages are encoded within the sounds, and how do their intended recipients receive and decode these signals?
H. Carl Gerhardt and Franz Huber address these questions among many others, drawing on research from bioacoustics, behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology to present the first integrated approach to the study of acoustic communication in insects and anurans. They highlight both the common solutions that these very different groups have evolved to shared challenges, such as small size, ectothermy, and noisy environments, as well as the diversity of solutions that reflect the differences in evolutionary history.
Synopsis
Walk near woods or water on any spring or summer night and you will hear a bewildering chorus of frog, toad, and insect calls. How are these calls produced? What messages are encoded within the sounds, and how do their intended recipients receive and decode these signals?
H. Carl Gerhardt and Franz Huber address these questions among many others, drawing on research from bioacoustics, behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology to present the first integrated approach to the study of acoustic communication in insects and anurans. They highlight both the common solutions that these very different groups have evolved to shared challenges, such as small size, ectothermy, and noisy environments, as well as the diversity of solutions that reflect the differences in evolutionary history.
About the Author
H. Carl Gerhardt is the Curators' Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Franz Huber is a professor emeritus and retired scientific member of the Max Planck Society and former director of the Division for Neuroethology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Seewiesen.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Acoustic Signals: Description and Peripheral Mechanisms
3. Neaural Control of Sound Production
4. Acoustic Criteria for Signal Recognition and Preferences
5. Processing of Biologically Significant Acoustic Signals in
the Auditory Periphery
6. Processing of Biologically Significant Sound Signals in
Central Auditory Systems
7. Sound Localization
8. Causes and Consequences of Chorusing
9. Acoustic Competition and Alternative Tactics
10. Female Choice Based on Acoustic Signals
11. Broad-Scale Patterns of Evolution
Appendices
Literature Cited
Index