Chapter 6 Anuran Acoustic Signal Perception in Noisy Environments

Choruses of acoustically signaling frogs and toads are among the most impressive acoustic spectacles known from the natural world. They are loud, raucous social environments that form for one purpose and one purpose only: sex. The loud sexual advertisement signals that males produce are often necessary and sufficient to elicit responses from reproductive females, and they also function in communicating with other males during interactions over calling sites and territories. Frogs listening in a chorus must detect, recognize, localize, and discriminate among competing signals amid high levels of biotic, and often abiotic, background noise. In essence, frogs must solve a biological analog of the human cocktail party problem. In this chapter, we describe the frog’s cocktail party problem in functional terms relevant to frog reproduction and communication. We then describe results from experimental studies, mostly of behavior, that elucidate how the frog auditory system goes about solving problems related to auditory masking and auditory scene analysis.