DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The Mechanisms and Evolution of Social Recognition in Rocket Frogs

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Humans are not the only animals that recognize familiar individuals. In fact, many animals can recognize their social partners. However, we still know little about the sensory and learning processes by which animals come to recognize familiar individuals and how this behavior evolves. This project uses playback experiments in the wild to compare the processes by which frogs learn to recognize their neighbors. By comparing the behavior of two closely-related frog species that differ in this ability but share a recent evolutionary ancestor, the project will also test how recognition behavior evolved. This project will provide an international experience for undergraduate students, and create materials for both a course at the University of Minnesota and a public museum exhibit at Kaieteur National Park in Guyana. Male Golden Rocket Frogs recognize and respond less aggressively to the calls of familiar territorial neighbors, while male Kai Rocket Frogs show no evidence of recognition. This project uses habituation-discrimination experiments with natural and synthetic calls to compare the perceptual basis of neighbor recognition in these two species. In the first experiment, the ability of males of both species to discriminate between the calls of different individuals will be examined to test the hypothesis that neighbor recognition evolves by narrowing the specificity of learned social categories. In the second experiment, synthetic calls, in which acoustic properties can be manipulated independently, will be used to test the hypothesis that male golden rocket frogs discriminate between the calls of different individuals using the most reliable acoustic cues of identity.