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

人类并不是唯一能认出熟悉的个体的动物。事实上，许多动物都能认出它们的社会伴侣。然而，我们仍然对动物识别熟悉的个体的感觉和学习过程以及这种行为是如何演变的知之甚少。这个项目使用野外的回放实验来比较青蛙学习识别邻居的过程。通过比较两个近缘青蛙物种的行为，这两个物种在这一能力上存在差异，但拥有共同的进化祖先，该项目还将测试识别行为是如何进化的。该项目将为本科生提供国际体验，并为明尼苏达大学的一门课程和圭亚那Kaieteur国家公园的公共博物馆展览创建材料。雄性金色火箭蛙对熟悉的领地邻居的叫声的识别和反应不那么咄咄逼人，而雄性凯氏火箭蛙没有表现出识别的证据。这个项目使用习惯化辨别实验，用自然叫声和合成叫声来比较这两个物种的邻居识别的知觉基础。在第一个实验中，将检验两个物种的雄性辨别不同个体叫声的能力，以检验邻居识别通过缩小习得的社会类别的特异性而进化的假设。在第二个实验中，可以独立操纵声学特性的合成叫声将被用来测试一种假设，即雄性金色火箭蛙使用最可靠的身份声学线索来区分不同个体的叫声。

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.