Frog Love Songs and the Sounds of Climate Change
Temperature Affects the Quality of Male Frogs’ Mating Calls. Females Hear the Difference.
When the time is right, a good love song can make all the difference.
A study from the University of California, Davis, found that temperature affects the sound and quality of male frogs’ mating calls. In the colder, early weeks of spring, their songs start off sluggishly. In warmer weather, their songs pick up the pace, and female frogs take note.
Better songs not only make the males more attractive mates, but they also suggest to females that environmental conditions are suitable for reproduction.
“The song of frogs really depends on the temperature of the environment,” said lead author Julianne Pekny, a UC Davis graduate student in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology when the study was conducted and currently director of conservation science with the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy in North Carolina. “As ponds warm, male frogs go from sounding slow and sluggish to faster and almost desperate. I can hear it with my human ears, and female frogs are also paying attention.”
For the study, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Pekny took to the water’s edges of Quail Ridge Ecological Reserve and Lassen Field Station, which are part of UC Natural Reserves. Microphone in hand, she recorded the hot and cold love songs of the Sierran treefrog to gauge the relationship between water temperature and their breeding calls. Songs from the same male were faster when water was warmer, both of which females typically prefer.
“What’s interesting to me is this could be a process by which females are tracking how seasonality is changing over time,” Pekny said. “As the pond warms, the sexier male calls come earlier, too.”
Read full article @ https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/frog-love-songs-and-sounds-climate-change