Multi-year soundscape recordings and automated call detection reveals varied impact of moonlight on calling activity of neotropical forest katydids.

Night-time light can have profound ecological effects, even when the source is natural moonlight. The impacts of light can, however, vary substantially by taxon, habitat and geographical region. We used a custom machine learning model built with the Python package to investigate the effects of moonlight on the calling activity of neotropical forest katydids over multiple years.

Levels of Airborne Sound And Substrate-borne Vibration Calling Are Negatively Related Across Neotropical False-leaf Katydids.

Animals often signal in multiple sensory modalities to attract mates, but the level of signaling investment in each modality can differ dramatically between individuals and across species. When functionally overlapping signals are produced in different modalities, their relative use can be influenced by many factors, including differences in signal active space, energetic costs, and predation risk. Characterizing differences in total signal investment across time can shed light on these factors, but requires long focal recordings of signal production.

Daily Signaling Rate and the Duration of Sound per Signal are Negatively Related in Neotropical Forest Katydids.

Researchers have long examined the structure of animal advertisement signals, but comparatively little is known about how often these signals are repeated and what factors predict variation in signaling rate across species. Here, we focus on acoustic advertisement signals to test the hypothesis that calling males experience a tradeoff between investment in the duration or complexity of individual calls and investment in signaling over long time periods. This hypothesis predicts that the number of signals that a male produces per 24 h will negatively correlate with (1) the duration of sound that is produced in each call (the sum of all pulses) and (2) the number of sound pulses per call.

Sheep in wolves' clothing: prey rely on proactive defences when predator and non-predator cues are similar.

Predation produces intense selection and a diversity of defences. Reactive defences are triggered by predator cues, whereas proactive defences are always in effect. We assess whether prey rely on proactive defences when predator cues do not correlate well with predation risk.

Applying and refining DNA analysis to determine the identity of plant material extracted from the digestive tracts of katydids.

Background: Feeding habits are central to animal ecology, but it is often difficult to characterize the diet of organisms that are arboreal, nocturnal, rare, or highly mobile. Genetic analysis of gut contents is a promising approach for expanding our understanding of animal feeding habits. Here, we adapt a laboratory protocol for extracting and sequencing plant material from gut contents and apply it to Neotropical forest katydids (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae) on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama.

Impact of intra- versus inter-annual snow depth variation on water relations and photosynthesis for two Great Basin Desert shrubs.

Snowfall provides the majority of soil water in certain ecosystems of North America. We tested the hypothesis that snow depth variation affects soil water content, which in turn drives water potential (Ψ) and photosynthesis, over 10 years for two widespread shrubs of the western USA. Stem Ψ (Ψ stem) and photosynthetic gas exchange [stomatal conductance to water vapor (g s), and CO2 assimilation (A)] were measured in mid-June each year from 2004 to 2013 for Artemisia tridentata var.