Function of Acoustic Signal Interactions

许多雄性动物会发出有节奏的歌声来吸引雌性动物交配。雄性通常是聚集的和结构化的合唱，其中雄性与邻居的呼叫交替或同步。有几个假说被提出来解释合唱结构，例如，男性应该合作，以免让女性感到困惑。这些想法并没有被证明是正确的，而另一种选择，即雄性竞争干扰竞争对手的叫声，得到了支持。这种竞争是由一种广泛的(包括人类)优先效应推动的，即女性只对领先的呼唤做出反应。然后，雄性会竞相发出领先的叫声。我们目前还不知道这些优先效应和男性信号策略是如何在自然合唱中发挥作用的，也不知道女性通过与领先的呼叫者交配获得了什么好处(即更好的基因)。数字技术的进步将允许记录自然界中的大型合唱团，并分析相关的呼叫计时策略。利用计算机模拟合唱的多人重放实验将被用来研究自然条件下的雌性交配偏好。这项研究的结果将增加我们对自然界中性别选择的操作和动物交流系统进化的理解。确定雌性偏好和雄性信号的差异以及密度等对其的影响将有助于我们更好地理解维持种群遗传差异的机制，这对进化生物学和保护生物学都很重要。

Many male animals produce rhythmic songs that attract females for mating. Males are often aggregated and structured choruses result where males either alternate or synchronize their calls with those of neighbors. Several hypotheses have been forwarded to explain chorus structure, suggesting, for example, that males cooperate so as not to confuse females. These ideas have not proved true and an alternative, that males compete to jam competitors calls, has been supported. This competition is driven by a widespread (including humans) precedence effect whereby females respond to only leading calls. Males, then, compete to produce leading calls. We do not currently know how these precedence effects and male signaling strategies function in natural choruses and what benefit females derive (i.e. better genes) by mating with leading callers. Advances in digital technology will allow recording of large choruses in nature and analysis of relative call-timing strategies. Multi-speaker playback experiments utilizing computer-simulated choruses will be used to examine female mating preferences under natural conditions.The findings of this study will increase our understanding of the operation of sexual selection in nature and the evolution of animal communication systems. Determination of the variance in, and the effects of density etc. upon, female preferences and male signaling will help us understand better the mechanisms that maintain genetic variance in populations, an issue important to both evolutionary and conservation biology.