Woe is the loner: Female Treefrogs prefer clusters of displaying males over single “hotshot” males

Communal displays such as leks and choruses are puzzling phenomena, as it is not obvious why signalers or choosers should aggregate. It has been hypothesized that signalers enjoy higher per capita reproductive success because choosers prefer to sample among dense configurations (“clusters”) that are easier to compare. While female preferences as well as the signal features of attractive males are well characterized in many chorusing species, we know little about how mate sampling is influenced by the spatial dynamics within communal displays. Here we ask how female Eastern Gray Treefrogs (Hyla versicolor) respond to isolated and clustered call stimuli in a simple 1 vs. 3 playback design. We explored i) whether females exhibit a general preference for call clusters, ii) whether spatial preference is robust to call-feature preference, and iii) how this affects the relative success of attractive and unattractive males in different spatial combinations. We found generalized spatial discrimi...