Excitatory and inhibitory interactions affect the balance of chorus activity and energy efficiency in the aggregation of male frogs: Theoretical study using a hybrid dynamical model

TL;DR

This paper presents a hybrid dynamical model to analyze how excitatory and inhibitory interactions influence frog chorus activity and energy efficiency, revealing a trade-off between collective calling and satellite behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid model capturing behavioral state switching in frogs, highlighting the impact of interactions on chorus dynamics and energy conservation.

Findings

Both chorus and satellite behaviors are reproducible in the model.

Satellite males extend the energy depletion time of the group.

Chorus activity levels are split into two over the period.

Abstract

We theoretically study the role of excitatory and inhibitory interactions in the aggregations of male frogs. In most frogs, males produce sounds to attract conspecific females, which activates the calling behavior of other males and results in collective choruses. While the calling behavior is quite effective for mate attraction, it requires high energy consumption. In contrast, satellite behavior is an alternative mating strategy in which males deliberately stay silent in the vicinity of a calling male and attempt to intercept the female attracted to the caller, allowing the satellite males to drastically reduce their energy consumption while having a chance of mating. Here we propose a hybrid dynamical model in which male frogs autonomously switch among three behavioral states (i.e., calling state, resting state, and satellite state) due to the excitatory and inhibitory interactions. Numerical simulation of the proposed model demonstrated that (1) both collective choruses and satellite behavior can be reproduced and (2) the satellite males can prolong the energy depletion time of the whole aggregation while they split the maximum chorus activity into two levels over the whole chorusing period. This study theoretically highlights the trade-off between energy efficiency and chorus activity in the aggregations of male frogs driven by the multiple types of interactions.