ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2916-0900
Current Organisation
University of Illinois
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Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 11-10-2022
DOI: 10.1101/2022.10.10.511585
Abstract: The emergence of complex social interactions is predicted to be an important selective force in the ersification of communication systems. Parental care presents a key social context in which to study the evolution of novel signals, as care often requires communication and behavioral coordination between parents and is an evolutionary stepping-stone towards increasingly complex social systems. Anuran hibians (frogs and toads) are a classic model of acoustic communication and the vocal repertoires of many species have been characterized in the contexts of advertisement, courtship, and aggression yet quantitative descriptions of calls elicited in the context of parental care are lacking. The biparental poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator , exhibits a remarkable parenting behavior in which females, cued by the calls of their male partners, feed tadpoles unfertilized eggs. Here, we characterized and compared calls across three social contexts, for the first time including a parental care context. We found that egg feeding calls share some properties with both advertisement and courtship calls but also had unique properties. Multivariate analysis revealed high classification success for advertisement and courtship calls but misclassified nearly half of egg feeding calls as either advertisement or courtship calls, suggesting additional signal modalities play a role in parental communication. Egg feeding and courtship calls both contained less identity information than advertisement calls, as expected for signals used in close-range communication where uncertainty about identity is low. Taken together, egg feeding calls likely borrowed and recombined elements of both ancestral call types to solicit a novel, context-dependent parenting response. Parental care has evolved independently in every major animal lineage and represents a major step in the evolution of complex sociality. Communication systems may need to increase in complexity. To explore these ideas, we characterized calls associated with trophic egg feeding, a unique cooperative parental behavior in the biparental mimic poison frog and compared them to calls associated with mate attraction (advertisement and courtship calls). Our analysis revealed some distinct, but many shared properties of signals elicited during egg feeding, suggesting that signals deployed in a novel social context evolve via modification and recombination of existing signals. These findings deepen our understanding of the relationship between complexity of social and communication systems.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2023
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 18-04-2023
Abstract: The emergence of complex social interactions is predicted to be an important selective force in the ersification of communication systems. Parental care presents a key social context in which to study the evolution of novel signals, as care often requires communication and behavioral coordination between parents and is an evolutionary stepping-stone toward increasingly complex social systems. Anuran hibians (frogs and toads) are a classic model of acoustic communication and the vocal repertoires of many species have been characterized in the contexts of advertisement, courtship, and aggression, yet quantitative descriptions of calls elicited in the context of parental care are lacking. The biparental poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator , exhibits a remarkable parenting behavior in which females, cued by the calls of their male partners, feed tadpoles unfertilized eggs. Here, we characterized and compared calls across three social contexts, for the first time including a parental care context. We found that egg-feeding calls share some properties with both advertisement and courtship calls but also had unique properties. Multivariate analysis revealed high classification success for advertisement and courtship calls but misclassified nearly half of egg feeding calls as either advertisement or courtship calls. Egg feeding and courtship calls both contained less identity information than advertisement calls, as expected for signals used in close-range communication where uncertainty about identity is low and additional signal modalities may be used. Taken together, egg-feeding calls likely borrowed and recombined elements of both ancestral call types to solicit a novel, context-dependent parenting response.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 16-09-2023
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 03-06-2019
Abstract: Affiliative behaviours have evolved many times across animals. Research on the mechanisms underlying affiliative behaviour demonstrates remarkable convergence across species spanning wide evolutionary distances. Shared mechanisms have been identified with genomic approaches analysing genetic variants and gene expression differences as well as neuroendocrine and molecular approaches exploring the role of hormones and signalling molecules. We review the genomic and neural basis of pair bonding and parental care across erse taxa to shed light on mechanistic patterns that underpin the convergent evolution of affiliative behaviour. We emphasize that mechanisms underlying convergence in complex phenotypes like affiliation should be evaluated on a continuum, where signatures of convergence may vary across levels of biological organization. In particular, additional comparative studies within and across major vertebrate lineages will be essential in resolving when and why shared neural substrates are repeatedly targeted in the independent evolution of affiliation, and how similar mechanisms are evolutionarily tuned to give rise to species-specific variations in behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Convergent evolution in the genomics era: new insights and directions'.
No related grants have been discovered for Eva K Fischer.