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...诸如求偶场（lek）与鸣唱集群（chorus）在内的公共展示行为是一类令人困惑的科学现象，因为信号发送者与择偶者为何会聚集在一起，其背后的演化逻辑尚不明确。已有假说提出，信号发送者的个体生殖成功率更高，这是因为择偶者更倾向于在便于对比的密集排布（即“集群”）中开展择偶采样。尽管在诸多鸣唱集群物种中，雌性择偶偏好以及雄性的吸引性鸣唱特征已被充分阐明，但我们对公共展示内部的空间动态如何影响择偶采样仍知之甚少。本研究旨在探究雌性东部灰树蛙（Hyla versicolor）在简单的1vs3回放实验范式中，对孤立鸣唱刺激与集群鸣唱刺激的响应差异。我们开展了三项探究：其一，雌性是否普遍存在对鸣唱集群的偏好；其二，空间偏好是否不受鸣唱特征偏好的干扰；其三，这种偏好如何影响不同空间排布下，具有吸引性与非吸引性的雄性的相对繁殖成功率。我们发现了普遍的空间辨别...