Acoustic Communication In Insects And Anurans

Walk near woods or water on any spring or summer night and you will hear a bewildering chorus of frog, toad, and insect calls. How are these caps produced ? What messages are encoded within the sounds, and how do their intended recipients receive and decode these signals ? H. Carl Gerhardt and Franz Huber address these questions among many others, drawing on research from bioacoustics, behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology to present the first integrated approach to the study of acoustic communication in insects and anurans. They highlight both the common solutions that these very different groups have evolved to shared challenges, such as small site, ectothermy, and noisy environments, as well as the diversity of solutions that reflect the differences in evolutionary history.