Túngara frog memory - behavioral data 2021-2022

Across taxa, males gather in leks to perform courtship displays for females. These leks are dynamic environments that include variations in male attendance, signal production, signal degradation, and predation attempts. This dynamic nature makes a female’s ability to recall the location of individual signalers an important component of female mate choice. It is hypothesized that multimodal displays may improve a female’s ability to remember a signaler. To test this hypothesis, we presented female túngara frogs (Physalaemus (=Engystomops) pustulosus) with playbacks of male calls (auditory) and robotic frogs (visual) that could later be obstructed from view. Specifically, we asked if females could remember the location of a multisensory signal after the visual component was occluded. We also conducted treatments that had silent pauses in the playbacks, and had increased presentation times. Memory instantiation (i.e. memory formation, storage, and retrieval) was achieved in treatments with silent periods and increased presentation times. Females’ ability to remember the location of the multisensory signal persisted for up to 25 s following a visual obstruction. We also recorded locomotor behaviors and found that they differed between treatment type; females were more likely to take indirect paths (vs direct) to their choice if their treatment incorporated a silent period. Silent pauses and visual obstructions are common in noisy forest choruses. Our data provide one of the few studies suggesting that multisensory signals are favored because they make signalers more memorable to receivers.Here, we release the data that were collected from these trials in 2021 and 2022.Speakers played male whine-chuck calls and served as the auditory stimulus. Robotic frogs served as an additional visual stimulus. Pairs were collected in amplexus at various sites around Gamboa, Panamá and were ID’d (“Frog #”) so that they could be returned to their original site.