Silent listeners: can preferences of eavesdropping midges predict their hosts’ parasitism risk?

Ivonne Meuche, Alexander Keller, Hanyrol H. Ahmad Sah, Norhayati Ahmad and T. Ulmar Grafe

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 4, 995-1003

Abstract: Eavesdropping predators and parasites that exploit the mating signals of their prey often prefer to approach certain signal variants. However, victim finding depends on many different factors. Therefore, preferences of eavesdroppers may not always directly reflect the predation or parasitism risk of the signaler. Frog-biting midges (Corethrella spp.) and their anuran hosts offer an excellent model system to investigate this correlation. Female Corethrella are vectors of trypanosomes in frogs and use the mating calls of their anuran hosts to localize them. We tested whether the acoustic preferences of Corethrella reflects the parasitism risk of male frogs by Corethrella and trypanosomes in the field. We conducted acoustic attraction and preference tests with Corethrella in the field and used the results of the preference tests to estimate a linear model (LM) and predict the parasitism risk of sympatric frog species by Corethrella. Our preference tests in the field showed that frog-biting midges preferred higher call rates, longer calls, a frequency around 2kHz, and sounds that were broadcast near the ground. Anuran species that were predicted by our LM to produce the most attractive signal showed the highest rates of parasitism by frog-biting midges and trypanosomes. Thus, acoustic preferences of eavesdropping Corethrella can be used to predict not only the parasitism rate of their host species by Corethrella but also the risk of subsequent trypanosome transmission.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arw002 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:27:y:2016:i:4:p:995-1003.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().