Masking by Noise in Acoustic Insects: Problems and Solutions

In most environments, acoustic signals of insects are a source of high background noise levels for many birds and mammals, but at the same time, their own communication channel is noisy due to conspecific and heterospecific signalers as well. In this chapter, I first demonstrate how this situation influences communication and the evolution of related traits at the population level. Solutions for communicating under noise differ between insect taxa, because their hearing system evolved independently many times, and the signals vary strongly in the time and frequency domain. After describing some solutions from the senders’ point of view the focus of the chapter is on properties of the sensory and central nervous system, and how these properties enable receivers to detect relevant acoustic events from irrelevant noise, and to discriminate between signal variants.