Complex choice environments shelter unattractive signallers from sexual selection

For many animals, options abound when choosing a mate in socially complex environments like a breeding chorus or lek. In such environments, receivers often choose their mate based on individual differences in signal repetition rate. However, signallers also differ in the regularity with which they produce repeated signals. Irregularity in signalling introduces uncertainty in decision-making by masking the among-individual variation in signalling rate that is a target of mate choice. At present, we know little about how the complexity of the choice environment impacts selection on rate and regularity, two signalling behaviours that receivers can only compare after sampling series of signals produced by multiple signallers. In this study of female grey treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis), we measured multivariate sexual selection on the rate and regularity of male calling behaviour using two-, four-, and eight-choice tests. Receivers overwhelmingly chose faster, more regular calling rates in tw..., These are data generated from phonotaxis (movement toward sound) of female gray treefrogs Hyla chrysoscelis. We calculated the Relative Fitness score for each hypothetical male phenotype in the dataset by dividing the number of times he , , # Complex choice environments shelter unattractive signallers from sexual selection

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gb5mkkx1v](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gb5mkkx1v)

## Description of the data and file structure

We measured sexual selection on call rate and call regularity (the coefficient of variation within males in call rate; standard deviation scaled by the mean) in Cope's gray treefrog* Hyla chrysoscelis*. We used phonotaxis tests of gravid gray treefrog females to infer how the selection was acting on male phenotypes in choice set sizes of 2, 4, or 8 competing males. We generated 'stimulus sets' of 8 hypothetical male phenotypes by drawing their mean values from  normal distributions to make a distribution representing their unique combination of call rate and regularity. Then we drew each instantaneous call rate in a sequence of calls from that distribution to generate an audio track that had some given level of rate and regularity. All code necessary to generate the stimuli,...,