From mating to foraging: the evolution of eavesdropping in frog-biting mosquitoes

<p>While the origins of communication signals have long fascinated evolutionary biologists, our understanding of how selective pressures across contexts shape sensory systems is still limited. Most mosquito and midge species use hearing during acoustic mating behaviors. For frog-biting species, however, hearing plays an important role beyond mating as females rely on anuran calls to obtain a blood meal. This dataset was used to directly test the hypothesis that hearing to exploit the communication system of frogs evolved, as a co-opted trait, from hearing conspecifics for mating. Behavioral, neurophysiological and biomechanical analyses revealed that the antenna of a unique frog-biting species can detect frog calls by relying on neural and mechanical responses comparable to those of non-frog-biting species. </p>