Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2015

Journal/Book/Conference Title

PeerJ

Volume

3

DOI of Original Publication

10.7717/peerj.1330

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1330

Date of Submission

December 2015

Abstract

As in insects, frogs and birds, vocal activity in fishes tends to be more developed in males than in females, and sonic swimbladder muscles may be sexually dimorphic, i.e., either larger in males or present only in males. Male oyster toadfish Opsanus tau L produce a long duration, tonal boatwhistle advertisement call, and both sexes grunt, a short duration more pulsatile agonistic call. Sonic muscles are present in both sexes but larger in males. We tested the hypothesis that males would call more than females by inducing grunts in toadfish of various sizes held in a net and determined incidence of calling and developmental changes in grunt parameters. A small number of fish were recorded twice to examine call repeatability. Both sexes were equally likely to grunt, and grunt parameters (sound pressure level (SPL), individual range in SPL, number of grunts, and fundamental frequency) were similar in both sexes. SPL increased with fish size before leveling off in fish >200 g, and fundamental frequency and other parameters did not change with fish size. Number of grunts in a train, grunt duration and inter-grunt interval were highly variable in fish recorded twice suggesting that grunt parameters reflect internal motivation rather than different messages. Grunt production may explain the presence of well-developed sonic muscles in females and suggests that females have an active but unexplored vocal life.

Rights

Copyright © 2015 Fine and Waybright This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

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Toadfish grunt raw data

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