A statistical approach to understanding reproductive isolation in two sympatric species of tree crickets.

In acoustically communicating animals, reproductive isolation between sympatric species is usually maintained through species-specific calls. This requires that the receiver be tuned to the conspecific signal. Mapping the response space of the receiver onto the signal space of the conspecific investigates this tuning.

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket.

Animals communicate in non-ideal and noisy conditions. The primary method they use to improve communication efficiency is sender-receiver matching: the receiver's sensory mechanism filters the impinging signal based on the expected signal. In the context of acoustic communication in crickets, such a match is made in the frequency domain.