Collaborative Research: A Comparative Systems Approach to Complex Animal Signaling

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Many animals use more than one of their senses to communicate with each other, for example, combining sounds with colors or motions. Understanding why animal signals are so complex and how they evolved is a major research focus for scientists in many fields. Such research can add to our knowledge about how the senses work, how attention and learning shift perception, and how changing environments can impact communication (among others). In this project, scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Auburn University use a systems approach to study the evolution of courtship displays in a well-developed animal system. The team uses genomics to reconstruct the evolutionary history of more than 23 species. For each species, they also describe the communication system in detail and how it changes with environmental conditions. They then test hypotheses about system properties such as robustness and flexibility/evolvability. The project will advance our understanding of complex animal signals, and test long-standing theories from engineering and genomics about system structure and function. The project involves the training of undergraduate and graduate students. Research findings will also be integrated into a science exhibit that will be made available to the general public at natural history museums in Nebraska and Alabama. Despite an appreciation of the prevalence and importance of complex signals in animal communication, progress towards an evolutionary analysis of signal complexity has been constrained by a lack of hypotheses and tools that can compare signaling systems across taxa and assess evolutionary and functional implications. This project develops and tests a novel theoretical and empirical paradigm by integrating a systems approach into animal communication research using Schizocosa wolf spiders. North American Schizocosa include 23 species that vary in their use of vibratory and visual courtship displays. Specific aims are (1) to assess the structure and dynamics of vibratory and visual courtship signals of each species in different environments; (2) to generate a robust phylogeny; and (3) to use phylogenetic comparative methods to test (i) the hypothesis that degeneracy facilitates robustness across changing conditions and (ii) whether degeneracy facilitates (or constrains) elaboration and signal divergence. The simultaneous measures of vibratory and visual signals across contexts combined with a robust phylogeny will enable unparalleled opportunities for evolutionary analyses of complexity. This research will facilitate an integrative and comprehensive understanding of the evolution, diversification, and maintenance of complex animal communication and provide a roadmap for similar studies across distinct taxa and signaling systems.