Data from: The effects of microhabitat specialization on mating communication in a wolf spider

Animal signals experience selection for detectability, which is determined
in large part by the signal transmission properties of the habitat.
Understanding the ecological context in which communication takes place is
therefore critical to understanding selection on the form of communication
signals. In order to determine the influence of environmental
heterogeneity on signal transmission, we focus on a wolf spider species
native to central Florida, Schizocosa floridana, in which males court
females using a substrate-borne vibratory song. We test the hypothesis
that S. floridana is a substrate specialist by (i) assessing substrate use
by females and males in the field, (ii) quantifying substrate-specific
vibratory signal transmission in the laboratory, and (iii) determining
substrate-specific mating success in the laboratory. We predict a priori
that (a) S. floridana restricts its signaling to oak litter, (b) oak
litter best transmits their vibratory signal, and (c) S. floridana mates
most readily on oak litter. We find that S. floridana is almost
exclusively found on oak litter, which was found to attenuate vibratory
courtship signals the least. Spiders mated with equal frequency on oak and
pine, but did not mate at all on sand. Additionally, we describe how S.
floridana song contains a novel component, chirps, which attenuate more
strongly than its other display components on pine and sand, but not on
oak, suggesting that the ways in which the environment relaxes
restrictions on signal form may be as important as the ways in which it
imposes them.